Illustration by Kai Henthorne-Iwane
The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) School Board held a special meeting on October 4 to discuss how academic assessments can best help students, parents, teachers, and administrators. In particular, the discussion focused on how the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) test should be used to inform district decisions.
The meeting was called as part of BUSD’s continued effort to address disparities in academic achievement that exist along racial lines.
The meeting included a public comment period during which many BUSD teachers and parents spoke out against the SBA.
Anna Maier from the Learning Policy Institute presented on performance-based testing and its use in schools around the state, and board members engaged in discussion.
The SBA is an online test that uses performance tasks to measure the knowledge and capabilities of students in relation to Common Core state standards.
Nearly all public commenters at the meeting were critical of the SBA. They voiced the belief that the SBA test is unhelpful to students and disruptive to classrooms. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers spoke about the intensive preparation that occurs in classrooms in order to prepare for the SBA and other standardized tests.
Berkeley High School economics teacher Matthew Meyer said at the meeting that while the SBA is one method to compare BUSD with other school districts, it’s not the only way.
Speaking about the preparation carried out by teachers for standardized tests, Meyer stated, “All this test prep did was show us how our test prep compared to other schools’ test prep. We still couldn’t say much about the skills that were important to us.”
Other speakers said local assessments are better for students than national and state standardized tests such as the SBA because results are returned quicker and inform students and teachers more accurately of what they need to work on.
One speaker at public comment was Rena Dorph, former director of a University of California research team that investigates the best practices for teaching STEM. Dorph discussed the need to pay attention to what assessments actually demonstrate when deciding how to use results. She said, in her previous experience evaluating assessments, many results did not accurately demonstrate a student’s ability in the field they were tested. She advocated for performance-based assessments, open-ended tasks intended to facilitate originality and creativity.
School board members agreed with commenters that performance and local assessments are useful in some ways, but said that standardized tests and the SBA also provide useful information, such as depicting district trends.
To illustrate this point, Karen Hemphill, a member of the BUSD School Board, said that without standardized tests, “We wouldn’t have known that we had the highest achievement gap along racial lines than any district in the state.”
Josh Daniels, the vice president of the board, added that he felt it would be a disservice to BUSD schools, as well as teachers and students, if standardized test scores weren’t taken into consideration when making decisions.
“There’s no magic bullet when it comes to assessments, as all assessments have both strengths and weaknesses,” said David Stevens, teacher on special assignment for the Berkeley Research, Evaluation, and Assessment office, a BUSD department that organizes assessments and evaluations. Stevens described different types of assessments: formative that encompass local assessments created by teachers, and summative, which include standardized tests. Formative assessments allow teachers to understand what students still need to learn, while summative assessments show what a student was supposed to have learned, Stevens said.
Stevens, Maier, and several school board members supported a balance of assessment types in order to fully understand how students are doing and to best prepare them. The board intends to hold another meeting in spring 2018 to discuss assessments further and create specific plans for BUSD schools.