If those two students are in the same school? Or if they are in two different schools within the same city?
This is the question at the core of the concept labeled ‘common assessment’ - a concept which is making itself felt at Pioneer High School, Huron High School, and the other schools in the AAPS.
This is not a simple debate. Which forms of testing are appropriate and which are inappropriate? To answer that question, we must first know what we teach, why we teach, and how we teach.
A related debate centers around a notorious phrase: “teaching to the test.” Again, we must not oversimplify: “teaching to test” can be a good practice or a bad practice - it depends largely on the test.
The drive for common assessments is designed to ensure that students are not receiving significantly different curricula while attending courses which bear the same designations. If one school’s Algebra II course is offering material which is offered in another school’s Algebra I course, then the transcripts of the students will mean less, because the course titles become ambiguous.
A good way to approach common assessments would be to use tests written, and in some cases even administered and graded, by someone other than the classroom teacher. The teacher would not see the tests prior to administration, but would have a clear idea of what types of questions would be on the test. That knowledge would inform the teacher’s lesson planning.
In short, common assessment should be external assessment.
The assessment could be written by another teacher in the district, or by a national testing company.
The larger the pool of students covered by a common assessment, the better. Having all the Geometry students in a school take a common assessment, among their several different teachers, is good; having all the Geometry students in the city take the common assessment, better.
If the test is not written by the classroom teacher, and if the classroom teacher is not allowed to see the test prior to its administration, the relationship of the teacher to the students is changed: with an external assessment, the teacher becomes more of a coach, preparing students to face a challenge.
If the teacher writes the assessment, the teacher is not a coach, but rather, the teacher, instead of the assessment, becomes the challenge, at least in the mind of the students.
A school district would be well-served to find providers of assessments, and use them as final exams and other milestone assessments, rather than teacher-generated assessments.
