Controversy over schools testing continues

WASILLA — Six months after Alaska teachers administered the pilot of a statewide assessment test, official results are finally coming back to them.

And they’re not pretty.

When the Alaska Measures of Progress (AMP) test came before students online this past spring, educators had faith that the University of Kansas-designed assessment had been tailored specifically to measure achievement in Alaska schools. According to an October 8 letter from a group of 20 school district superintendents to the Alaska State Board of Education, the state was able to offer such a test as a result of a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which allowed the state to create its own system of evaluation of college and career readiness.

“At the time of the waiver … there was general consensus that we were headed in the right direction for the students and taxpayers of the state. However the devil was in the details,” the letter reads, in part.

When it came time for students to take the test, school districts quickly perceived a lack in the technology required to administer the computerized assessment, which according to the state’s 5-year contract with the test designer had to occur within a narrow timeframe.

Until recently, the state had also intended to add a written component for the coming spring testing cycle, which would increased the number of necessary testing days without extending the entire period in which all students were to complete all portions of AMP.

According to Monica Goyette, the Mat-Su Borough School District’s executive director for elementary instruction, 17 computer carts with as many as 36 laptops in each would have to have been purchased to accommodate this.

The state has agreed to put the written component addition on hold for now, Goyette said, but there’s still the matter of class interruption by the current test, which requires students to shuffle to and from computer labs during the day.

And, the contract said the results would not be intended for use in making instructional decisions until the 5-year mark.

“We weren’t gonna have good results for years,” Goyette said Wednesday.

School district superintendent Deena Paramo said time was only the initial problem, however. Preliminary results distributed to Alaska superintendents in early October showed that the local school district and the state as a whole fell far below expectations, based on previous student performance measured by the Standards Based Assessments test, which was replaced by AMP.

According to a document on the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) website, the former test showed about 80 percent of students statewide were proficient in reading and around 70 percent were proficient in mathematics. In contrast, preliminary AMP results showed about 35 percent of students meeting the standard set for Alaska in language arts, and only 30 percent meeting the mathematical standard.

Rather than accept that Alaska students are not doing as well in these subjects as parents, teacher and school officials thought, the general conclusion is that the test’s measure of student achievement doesn’t provide instructors with a way to advance learning.

“This isn’t a good test to tell how kids should learn,” Paramo said by phone Wednesday.

Paramo indicated in a letter to Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) Commissioner Mike Hanley that AMP scores reflect much broader categories than that of the SBA. For example, Word Identification Skills, Forming a General Understanding, and Analysis of Content and Structure are all scored subsets of Reading in the SBA, which is a singular category under AMP. Mathematics is structured similarly, with SBA including more subject-specific subsets.

In a teleconference from Juneau on Thursday morning, Rep. Jim Colver (R-Palmer) championed the superintendents’ cause, echoing the sentiments expressed in their letters.

“I haven’t been convinced that (AMP) has improved student learning,” Colver said. “It’s just determining a bar and telling us which kids made it over the bar and which kids didn’t make it over the bar.”

The perceived arbitrariness of the test and its expense to the state — DEED pays $54 per student to administer AMP, Colver said — are two of the main reasons the legislator cited for wanting the evaluation reevaluated, but there’s more. Colver and Paramo, among others, have also claimed that many school districts already have the assessment they need in the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). The MAP test is also administered online and has been used in the Mat-Su school district for 10 years, Paramo said, and provides “good data” and “instant results” that compare Alaska students to those in the Lower 48 (unlike AMP, in which scores reflect how students measure up to pre-determined achievement levels defined by Alaska teachers).

This has led Rep. Colver to introduce a bill requiring, in part, that MAP replace AMP statewide, not just in the Mat-Su. Colver said all these issues will be discussed at a state Education Committee meeting in about two weeks.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-92266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.