Searching for the Center

Sep 16, 2022

In 1990 the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) publicized results of a study to explain steady growth in European wages in contrast to a static picture of wages in the United States. What was going in? The answer caused an ongoing public school reform effort in this country to swell, a movement to establish national learning standards for K-12 public schools.

NCEE worked with Lauren Resnick from the University of Pennsylvania to study differences in education between Europe and the U.S. for explanations of wage differences. Could it be that superior education systems might produce more sophisticated workers who are more valuable in the labor market? Lauren Resnick found that most European countries had created coherent, centered education systems with learning standards, curriculum frameworks, and robust and layered authentic assessment systems.

Authentic in this instance is a metaphor, not a judgment. In jewelry it’s the difference between cubic zirconium and diamond. In a jewelry store it’s the difference between a legit bill and a counterfeit. In classrooms it’s the difference between the learning that teachers see going on in living classrooms when the idea is for children to be learning and the learning somebody would see if they poked in their head for an hour or so with some curriculum-neutral tests. Just as the test is fake (despite its reliability and validity), the learning it measures isn’t the genuine article.

In 1991 Lauren Resnick and the New Standards Project (NSP) commenced grant-funded work on developing a nationwide, authentic performance assessment system aligned to new national standards for use in the K-12 public schools to reach maturity in 2001:

As a public school teacher working on behalf of the State of California in a consortium of States which grew from 14 to over 40 between 1991-1996, I participated in development meetings with hundreds of other teachers and helped write the English-Language Arts portfolio handbook and materials. This assessment protocol aimed to measure writing as a verb, not a noun, as it occurs in existential classrooms, not under test conditions. I also worked on the nuts and bolts of curriculum-embedded fieldwork, an invasive strategy that enlisted the teacher-as-teacher, not proctor, in an external assessment event. A curriculum-embedded performance task must be worth doing in its own right, since its function is to fit into lesson plans as an instructional unit for a teacher and class with assessment evidence collected and exported for scoring customized to the tasks making up the unit.

Then suddenly, amazingly, in 1996 the NSP collapsed. I heard that the collapse was actually a change in mission and direction. I haven’t a clue about what really happened. It stopped. Falling so soon after the collapse of CLAS in 1994 with no inkling of a future direction, the NSP’s failure to thrive was tough. It felt like a lot of work for nothing.

Like CLAS, the NSP could not really evaporate into thin air because so many people from classroom teachers to principals to local curriculum offices to state departments and university research centers now knew about the uncanny power of authentic assessment to transform inauthentic learning cultures. Such secrets do not evaporate.

I will write future posts reflecting on my experiences with the NSP portfolio strategy. In this post I want to share one example of an NSP Language Arts Curriculum-Embedded Performance Task (CEPT) on which I worked.

One quality of a good NSP CEPT is its inherent relevance and value as grounds for student learning. The CEPT needs to be about something important, a topic or question or issue within reach of the students offering up a chance to learn deeply. For this reason, I argue that teachers who write CEPTs need dedicated, in-depth professional development. They need to understand a good assessment as a precision tool that removes evidence of learning without damage.

So before I can discuss an NSP-written and field-tested CEPT titled Man and his Message I’ll take you back to the lived facts behind the task, back to the historical content of this assessment which would serve as an instructional plan for teaching students to examine and weigh Martin Luther King’s philosophy of non-violence in light of recent violence. As a by-product external reviewers would access and score evidence from learning activity linked to standards.

Life-Embedded Background to the NSP Curriculum-Embedded Performance Task for Middle School

The 1992 Los Angeles rebellion lasted five days in spring, linking this urban geography in history to a long line of rebellions in American cities large and small stretching back to Detroit, 1967, and Watts, 1965 (Hinton, 2021). In addition to 23 dead in LA, thousands were injured, and 3,767 buildings were destroyed.

These recurring rebellions, code word “urban riots,” were part of a loop Hinton documented in 2021: Hyper police surveillance of minority communities kindled defensive and frustrated resistance in the communities until a spark, often a real, imagined, or fictional ‘sniper,’ fomented gun battles, death, and destruction followed by promises to pilot and experiment until things simmered down. Violence begets violence. Over fifty years these rebellions, started and ended by police action, moved from city to city, prompting “pilot programs” and “baby steps” that marked a path to our current meltdown.

The spark in LA was the acquittal of four white officers charged with excessive force against a black man, Rodney King, in 1991 after two California Highway Patrol officers pulled Mr. King over for a traffic stop in the San Fernando Valley. The whole thing might have been avoided if four Los Angeles Police Department officers had not arrived to take over the case with violence. A man across the way made a 12-minute video recording of the beating of Rodney King by white police officers.

Hector Tobar (2022)1 was a young reporter for the LA Times in 1992. He was born and raised in East Los Angeles, the son of a Guatemalan immigrant who had at one time delivered the Times. Reflecting as an elder journalist on his experience as a young journalist thirty years earlier covering the public’s response to the refusal of a white jury in Simi Valley to convict the officers, he still in 2022 was not completely clear on the meaning of the violence. But he was clear that white supremacy reigned among the Times editorial staff back in the day. He wanted his readers to see the facts, sure…

Meanwhile in another part of California…

I found myself at a gathering of hundreds of educators near the end of August, 1991, at a ski resort in Colorado. California had signed on to a collaborative assessment design project involving 14 states over ten years. CLAS sent me and another teacher as state representatives I think because nobody else wanted to do it. It was called the New Standards Project2.

The idea was to design a portfolio assessment system for English and Mathematics to provide for the exporting of student work chosen by students in their classrooms with accompanying student-written reflections and contextual details to a site for national scoring according to a portfolio rubric. A parallel line of development was dedicated to creating, field-testing, and writing task-specific rubrics for curriculum-embedded performance tasks.

Soon the New Standards Project received additional grant funds, and more states joined.

Between 1991 and 1996 NSP produced and field-tested portfolio assessment systems for Mathematics and English with field handbooks and professional development materials, performance tasks with instructional protocols, scoring rubrics, anchors for calibration, and technical data. The NSP collapsed in 1996 not because it tried to do too much, but because it could not deliver quickly enough. Like CLAS, it needed more time and resources; like Common Core, it needed more friends in positions of power.

What were states to do with all of this clamor for authentic assessment but no more New Standards Project?

Man and His Message

Creating an NSP curriculum-embedded performance task lasting several hours or days in a classroom is constructing a unit of instruction. Important differences in emphasis include preparing activities and tools to collect evidence of learning behaviors which scorers use, appropriately scaffolding learning strategies (e.g., note-taking template, a framing question) to keep the task organized and within reach at the developmental level in question, and sequencing the activities to go deeper into the problem or topic or question and end with a culminating performance.

“Man and His Message” turned out to be the Open Mind of the NSP for me. The issue to examine was violent vs. nonviolent resistance to injustice. Students would view film, read newspaper articles, use a note-taking system, read and discuss Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and write a letter explaining their reasoned position on non-violence as a response to injustice.

Man and his Message turned out to be a model curriculum-embedded task on my rubric. I hope somebody still has it in a box or a filing cabinet or a hard drive. My memory of the task does not do it justice. Before I end this post I’ll present an example of a more recently developed Common Core performance task and assess it on the same rubric.

The Arkansas Answer in California

I have no knowledge of the complete inventory of CEPTs the NSP produced. I can attest to the richness of the opportunity for the hundreds of teachers who participated in co-creating the NSP to capacitate their deployment of a pragmatic knowledge of assessment in the service of learning in the trenches. Teachers plan relevant, meaningful instructional units all the time. These same teachers can build assessments inside a robust, ecologically non-intrusive portfolio system—the building of the assessments, the teaching of the assessments, and the scoring of the assessments put teachers in the driver’s seat, and the NSP road ahead offered promise of a fruitful journey.

When the NSP collapsed, states scrambled to find a solution to the learning-teaching-assessment problem. It was too late to return to the days before the education community made such a fuss about standards, accountability, and authenticity. But federal dollars from No Child Left Behind as well as Title I money came with standardized assessment strings attached. Many states faced the dilemma of trying to appear assessmentally authentic while holding on to the ease of the bubble test.

With the exception of Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska, the other states also hired a testing company to write performance-based tests. California and dozens of other states signed on to the Smarter Balanced Company.

Balancing Smartly on a Bubble

In the summer of 2008, the embarrassment of being the United States, 21st century citadel of freedom and justice, still without a national set of learning standards was too much to bear. Two advocates for a do over for national standards, Gene Wilhoit representing state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an advocate for college readiness, met with Bill and Melinda Gates in search of funds to pay for a project to write the Common Core academic standards. The picture they painted for the Gateses of a meaningless collection of state standards in a waste land of hollow diplomas and degrees touched a nerve. Gene and David were awarded $200 million.3

In parallel developments, Arne Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, announced a Race to the Top. The federal government put up $4.3 billion dollars in grant money for proposed state and local projects. To secure moneys, states needed respectable learning standards and tests. The Common Core Standards were free. Two testing companies were authorized to create tests for the standards, and states could join a company. California joined Smarter Balanced.

The Smarter Balanced testing company published its strategic plan for 2022-2027. The following summarizes its strategic goals:

As Smarter Balanced test company pursues its goal to become your go-to one-stop learning assessment center, it continues to produce performance tasks like the Astronauts Informational Performance Task. I end this post with this performance task worksheet and invite your comments on it. Is this task cubic zirconium or diamond? Scroll on. Then come back and comment.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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