By Thomas Ultican / Tultican / May13,2021
At 1:45 PM Wednesday, May 12, the California State Board of Education (SBE) adopted a “student growth model” to evaluate student learning. It is a method fans of standardized test based accountability have been trumpeting. The big winner here is the testing giant Education Testing Services (ETS) who created the model to be used.
Board member Sue Burr who was appointed to the board by then Governor Jerry Brown made the motion for using the growth model. She carefully presented her motion directly from the state’s California Department of Education (CDE) staff report which recommended:
“The student growth model methodology, which includes using RG [residual growth] scores and the EBLP [Empirical Best Linear Prediction] hybrid approach to report aggregated student growth, and that the following score reporting be adopted.
Board member Patricia Ann Rucker seconded the motion. She is a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association.
The measure was adopted by a unanimous 10-0 vote. The only member of the eleven-member board not voting for it was Board President Linda Darling-Hammond who was absent.
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Well, the University of California has just jettisoned the SAT and the ACT for future college admissions. That reform was long overdue.
But for the last decade or more, the revisionist and powerful California Teachers’ Association has pushed against academic standards-of-any-kind for our K-12 students. The high school exit exam was dropped. Testing to measure student progress in reading and math has been paused, revised and redesigned so that past academic performance can never be measured against present learning achievement. Charter schools, organized by families who want something different and hopefully better for their kids, have been vilified as un-American. And none of the above begins to describe the disastrous past two pandemic years of California public schools’ failure to engage, retain and educate the children, while fully protecting wage-raises and optimal working condition for teachers.
I guess I’m just lukewarm on any fancy argument for sticking our heads in the sand and not
trying to know what kids may have learned in the course of an academic year and how much work still remains to be done.