Wilder
“May the Fourth Be With You,” read large paper letters, while another sign reminded students of the names of their “Jedi Trainers,” one of whom, Linda Gilbert, told them what to expect when they opened their Chromebook laptops to take the test.
“Some of the questions you’ll know and you’ll go right through, and others will be hard for you,” she said. The 31 students began to open their computers. “But I want you just to do the best you can.”
Gilbert, who has been teaching at Dothan Brook since it opened in 1993, was long-practiced at adopting just the right tone — brisk but casual, designed to command the students’ attention without freaking them out.
And it’s not hard to understand why a standardized test like the one the students were about to take might make them nervous: They seem to make everyone in the world of Vermont education — from top state officials to parents and teachers — nervous.
In early 2015, the Vermont State Board of Education suspended the use of scores from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC, tests to formally evaluate schools across the state. The tests typically are used each spring to measure how well a student is doing in relation to federal Common Core standards.
Despite that move, Vermont students have taken the tests for each of the past two years, and the release of each batch of results is accompanied by a wave of anxiety as parents, administrators and teachers try to suss out whether the numbers indicate a flaw in the classroom that might need correcting.
“I’ve always had problems with standardized testing,” said Hartford School Board member Nancy Russell, who works in preschools, during an April 2016 meeting of the Hartford School Board at which administrators reviewed the district’s 2015 SBAC scores with board members.
Superintendent Tom DeBalsi said Hartford shouldn’t be directly compared to certain high-scoring towns such as Hanover, which has a 3 percent poverty rate. About a third of Dothan Brook’s 280 pre-K through fifth-grade students are on the free or reduced lunch program, about double the number from 10 years ago, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.
And Nelson Fogg, principal at Hartford High School, pointed out reasons that the SBAC test might not be taken as seriously as one that directly affects a student’s classroom grade. “Students admit readily that they don’t care about the test,” Fogg said. “They’re not motivated for the test. They see no connection between their lives and the test. And that skews results.”
That’s when DeBalsi announced the district’s planned response — a major initiative that would allow the district to do better by SBAC standards.
“It’s been a while since the Hartford School District had an assessment plan, so I’m really excited about this, because we’re going to put a new assessment in place,” he said.
In other words, the school district decided it could better meet the requirements of the widely criticized SBAC standardized tests by implementing a series of different tests over which teachers and school officials would have more control.
And, while the SBAC test was administered to a few select grades, beginning this year, the new test is being given to every student in grades three through 11 in Hartford’s 1,600-student district at least three times a year.
The students in Gilbert’s classroom were among the first to try the new Star test, from Wisconsin-based Renaissance Learning Inc. (Originally dubbed STAR, for Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading, the assessment tests now offered by Renaissance Learning cover several topics, including reading mathematics and early literacy.)
Supporters say the Star test is dramatically different than the SBAC test, and it has many educators within the Hartford district excited about its potential to help them teach students.
One of the big knocks against the SBAC test is that it doesn’t generate “actionable data” — by which critics mean teachers can’t use the results to improve the education of a tested student. By the time teachers get the results, the students who took the test have moved on to other classrooms and the teachers are already immersed in the challenges of teaching the next year’s students.
Instead, educators favor tests that let them know how a student is doing earlier in the year, a category of test referred to as “formative assessments,” said Rick Dustin-Eichler, Dothan Brook’s principal.
Teachers, said Dustin-Eichler, are caught between the rock of a limited school day and the hard place of an ever-increasing list of demands. “The school day’s not getting longer,” he said. “We had a 6½-hour school day back in the early 1900s, and you still have a 6½-hour school day, and we’re not just teaching reading, writing, ’rithmetic anymore.”
The district has relied in the past on an assessment test from Fountas & Pinnell Literacy, which is part of the professional development division of Portsmouth, N.H.-based education publisher Heinemann Publishing.
The Fountas & Pinnell test does a good job of yielding data, Dustin-Eichler said, but it has one big drawback: The teacher administers the test orally, to one student at a time, and it takes 45 minutes, “so it’s a day out of the classroom for the teacher,” Dustin-Eichler said.
The Star exam has grown in popularity in America’s school districts and over the past five years, the number of schools using at least one Star product has grown from 26,000 to 38,000, according to Renaissance spokeswoman Melissa Ripp.
The company says teachers gave 70 million of its tests, including Star, to more than 18 million students during the 2014-2015 school year, and in 2014, it received a $40 million investment from Google Capital in a transaction that valued Renaissance at $1 billion.
In April, Hartford decided to buy into the Star system, paying about $16,000 in startup costs. In addition, the district pays Renaissance annual fees of $600 per school, and $8.10 per student, which works out to about $11,000 for each year, in exchange for which the district can test the students as often as it wants.
In Gilbert’s fourth-grade classroom, the day’s Star test was the second of the week. The district plans a second wave of two-day tests in January, and a third in the spring.
Star differs from the Fountas & Pinnell test in that it consists of multiple-choice questions, and the students in Gilbert’s classroom zipped through the math assessment in about 20 minutes. Renaissance says that using its test has saved teachers 34 million hours in instructional time.
“The thing that Renaissance Learning claims, that we won’t know until we see it happening, is that it gets quality data in a short amount of time. That’s different and it’s kind of exciting,” Dustin-Eichler said.
Gilbert asked several students to help their peers find the right program icon on their screens. They began the test at about 11:30, and would be done before noon.
“Talk about startup time,” Dustin-Eichler murmured approvingly. “Two minutes, literally, and they’re already going. … Soon, they’ll wrap up and go to lunch.”
“It’s got to impact instruction. If it doesn’t impact instruction, if it doesn’t change student outcomes, then it’s not worthwhile,” Dustin-Eichler said. “It’s got to impact kids.”
One irony of education is that, if a teacher has a successful program in place, he or she should plan on changing it. Because technology, new requirements and shifts in emphasis are constantly evolving, even a very successful educator is forced to adapt in an effort to stay ahead of the curve.
When the most recent federal SBAC test was administered in March, the students in Gilbert’s classroom this year were third-graders, and they knocked it out of the park. At the time, 86 percent of them demonstrated proficiency in math, and 77 percent demonstrated proficiency in language.
Statewide, 56 percent of third-graders were proficient in math and 54 percent in language on the same SBAC test.
While the Dothan Brook students in fourth and fifth grade outperformed the state by similar margins, the same isn’t true at Hartford High School. There, 42 percent of about 127 eleventh-graders were proficient in language and 23 percent in math, lower than the state averages of 57 percent language proficiency and 38 percent math proficiency.
It’s the educator’s knotty problem to understand and work with these numbers in their proper context, without becoming obsessed with them. In Hartford, the hope is that Star can help them do that.
The most important part of the Star system isn’t visible to the students who use their laptop keyboards to answer the questions on their screens. As soon as they finish the last question, a new set of data is incorporated into a sophisticated back-end software system that allows teachers to view results instantly and generate a series of reports on individual children or the class as a whole.
A week after the students took the tests, Gilbert and other Dothan Brook teachers spent an afternoon with a trainer who walked them through those results, helping them to access and make sense of the reports Star can generate.
For each student, for each skill, there is a color-coded system that helps teachers make sense of the profusion of numbers. Green is the best, blue is acceptable. Yellow and red cause concern.
In Gilbert’s class, she said, three or four students weren’t “in the green,” meaning they needed special attention to get proficient.
Gilbert said the results allowed her to separate students into different groups. Breaking students up by ability — advanced, on pace, lagging — is something she’s been doing for years, but Star allowed her to make better distinctions for more skills. “I didn’t differentiate. I hadn’t figured that one out,” Gilbert said. “So even though I already tried a lot of things, I did come out with something new.”
Teacher Tricia Pfeiffer, who has gone through the same process across the hall with her third-graders, said not everyone took to what was, for many of them, their first computer-based test.
“One kid didn’t do it. He just sat there and didn’t do it. I think he was a little nervous,” Pfeiffer said.
Another student flew through the language assessment so quickly it seems unlikely the questions were actually read. And when she got the results, Pfeiffer saw that one student tested much higher than she would have guessed, and another tested much lower.
“We had surprises both ways. Some I was like ‘Really? They finished here?’ ” Pfeiffer said.
She said she would turn her attention to trying to find out why a student who hasn’t displayed exceptional skills in class might have excelled on the test.
“I could expect more but there also could be other factors. They might not like to speak out loud. They might not like to read out loud. They might be better on a computer, …” Pfeiffer said. “But it makes me think there’s more there than what I knew.”
People often don’t understand that teachers are using empirical evidence to adjust their lesson plans, Gilbert said.
“Teachers use data when we’re instructing and we think deeply about how kids are performing so that we can take where they are and move forward,” Gilbert said. “It’s part of the job. I don’t think people understand how deeply we think about it.”
There are reasons not to lean on Star results too heavily. A multiple choice test, even a very sophisticated one, doesn’t ask a student to construct a sentence or make an argument. And a student might just be having an unusual day.
“You take a kid, they had a knockdown brawl with their sibling, which everybody with siblings knows you get in a fight, or, you know, you have a bad morning and your cereal spills in your lap, your dog eats your homework, you’re not going to do as well on that test,” Dustin-Eichler said.
Gilbert said she’s seen assessment tests come and go over the past 23 years. They’re helpful, she said, but she keeps them in perspective.
“It’s a data point,” she said.
Still, Gilbert and Pfeiffer both said they’re likely to use Star again soon. Gilbert wants to use it in November to track growth in the students’ ability to multiply two-digit numbers, long before the next districtwide test date in January, while Pfeiffer will soon give the students who had performed against expectations another look.
“Those are the kids I think we want to test, assess again,” she said. “Sooner rather than later, just to see whether it was a fluke, to see, ‘is it matching what we see in the classroom?’ ”
The hope is that students in Dothan Brook, and throughout the district, not only will perform better when the next SBAC is administered in March, but be better prepared for the future.
“It has given us really good information,” Gilbert said, “but it’s too early to tell.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.