Michael Swickard
This column is exactly 700 words. Room temperature is 73.4 and on the scale today I weighed… forget that. We are a measuring society. Centuries ago clocks only had the hour hand, which was close enough. Then came the minute and second hands and we became precision junkies. People now use cell phones for time, e-mail, texting and getting tickets for doing so while driving.
We Americans poke, prod and measure everything, including how much we measure things. It is our way of improving ourselves. Scientists for centuries have known measurement as the first step to improvement. Sir William Thomson said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
During the recent race for New Mexico governor, then-candidate Susana Martinez talked often about bringing “short cycle assessments” to public education. She expressed frustration that New Mexico students are tested in the spring and then in September the results (often bad) are given to communities.
The problem with a September release of test data is that it is too late to change any educational procedures to improve the students of that previous school year. The hay, so to speak, is already in the barn.
And there is the rub for New Mexico public education. Much more valuable, as Governor Martinez correctly points out, would be the ability to predict with confidence which students were going to achieve success and importantly, which students need a special intervention right now if they are to get on grade level.
Easy to get lots of data
These concerns are in an area of RTI, response to intervention. When a school decides a student is not thriving with the typical instructional actions, then an intervention is attempted. The sticking points are how to know a student is not thriving and how to know which parts of the instructional sets the student knows, and does not need extra work on, and which parts need a different instructional method for the student.
In a better educational world, if a student is not working on grade level, there would be a standard of data that would show how well the student is doing each week and predict if the student, given the current intervention, would be able to increase his/her ability to where that student is working on grade level. Most of the data in education should be targeted toward helping the student improve rather than to bash schools.
Short cycle assessment, which is a formative assessment, is the way the community could know what is happening in the classrooms essentially at all times, not just next September, while also helping students improve every day. Further, with a data standard of knowing at all times certain information about the abilities of students to learn to read or do math, the enterprise of education can make informed decisions about what is the best way for a struggling student to get on grade level in reading and math.
It is easy to get lots of data. Schools do it all the time, but first there must be a standard for the data in three areas: Schools must use the least disruptive form of assessment for gathering the data; the data must be directly helpful to the instructional task while also addressing management concerns; and there must be validity to the predictive ability of the data to direct changes in the instructional methods.
We can have the data every week
One of the concerns of educators is the time spent pulling students out of class to be tested. That is time not on the task of learning. A new direction is to give computer-structured and sustained practice to students who are fragile, and use the power of computers in that practice to note exactly what students know and do not know while the students are practicing. The students gain doing the practice and the data drives the decisions.
With that data RTI decisions are easy to make and management can have updates as to the prediction of reaching grade level daily. We do not have to wait until September for data; we can have it every week. We are in the 21st Century, so New Mexico should use new short-cycle assessment tools to improve our students.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces and throughout the state through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.