The Education Gadfly Weekly

Now seventeen years old, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts (QC) report grades states (and the U.S. as a whole) on six indicators: K–12 achievement; standards, assessment, and accountability; the teaching profession; school finance; “transitions and alignment” (which investigates early-childhood programming and college and career readiness); and the ever-controversial “chance for success” index. In this iteration, only the latter three have been updated—which strengthens the feeling that we’ve read this book before: The top five states retained their positions (with Maryland at the head with a B-plus), as did the lowest (South Dakota, D-plus). The U.S. average crept from 76.5 to 76.9. Even the most notable shifts aren’t exactly page-turners: West Virginia bumped from fourteenth to second on the school-finance indicator by upping its per-pupil funding $1,000. And Georgia earned the series’ first perfect score on “transitions and alignment” by embracing QC’s fourteen pet policies (like defining school or work readiness). Beyond the state rankings, this year’s QC also explores the intersection between school-discipline policies and student learning, calling attention to a key tradeoff: How do education leaders balance the need for a safe environment (not just by keeping weapons out of schools but by keeping other violence and disruption out, as well) against the benefits of keeping kids in school? Conventional wisdom says that too many students are being suspended or expelled—but “fixing” that problem might create new ones. If quality is to “count,” then classrooms need to be places of learning, not disruption.

SOURCE: Education Week, Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, January 10, 2013).

For over a decade, and almost entirely under the leadership of the prolific Paul Hill, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has promoted the “portfolio-district strategy,” in which districts manage a “portfolio” of diverse schools (charters, magnets, traditionals), each with a high degree of school-level autonomy and accountability. Since beginning this work, CRPE has written myriad reports on the PMM (portfolio-management model) and partnered with an ever-larger number of districts to help them roll out this strategy. Strife and Progress—a new book by Paul Hill and two current CRPE firecrackers, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross—compiles their immense amount of knowledge and experience. First, the authors outline and explain the seven components that any successful portfolio-district strategy must embrace: school choice, school autonomy, equitable school funding, talent-seeking and retention, support from independent groups, performance-based accountability, and public engagement. Drawing on case studies of several portfolio districts (mainly New York City, New Orleans, D.C., Chicago, and Denver), it then probes both the strategy’s promise and challenges. Clearly, for example, it cannot succeed without political support: The book is admirable in its acknowledgement of past public-relations failures within districts of this sort (e.g., the contentious tenures of Michelle Rhee and Cathie Black), and it expends much ink on the need to build relationships with local organizations and clearly communicate such measures as school closings and openings. Further, establishing the success of the portfolio model proves problematic, mostly because of numerous confounding variables. The authors do, however, offer concrete ways to deal with this complexity, including natural experiments through school lotteries and time-series analyses (which might, for instance, look at a student’s performance in one school versus another). The challenges, then, are real but not insurmountable. At a time when some people want to give up on urban districts entirely, the strategies set forth in Strife and Progress may offer this governance structure a fighting chance for success.

SOURCE: Paul T. Hill, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross, Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012).

Successful Common Core implementation will hinge on a number of factors. Among the largest of these will be getting the assessments right—in terms of both design and cost. Central to these issues are the controversial multiple-choice “bubble” tests, which are welcomed by some as fast and efficient means of gauging student knowledge and skills and derided by others as the cause for “teaching to the test” and superficial knowledge. This recent report found within the Journal of Psychological Science finds merit in the bubble test—if designed well. It explains findings from two small-sample studies (one had thirty-two participants, conducted out of UCLA, the other ninety-six, conducted out of Washington U.). The upshot: Both found that properly structured multiple-choice tests (those which offer plausible wrong answers alongside the correct response) “trigger the retrieval processes that foster test-induced learning and deter test-induced forgetting.” In other words, bubble tests with competitive responses trigger actual knowledge-retrieval processes rather than simple recognition processes—and do so better than cued-recall (fill-in-the-blank) tests. The bottom line is both cautiously encouraging. Multiple-choice tests—done correctly—can be a useful tool in an assessor’s kit (a point that we have previously argued). The CCSS assessment consortia would be wise to keep that in mind.

SOURCE: Genna Angello, Elizabeth Bjork, Robert Bjork, and Jeri Little, “Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting,” Psychological Science 23, no. 11 (October 2012): 1337-44.

Mike and emerging scholar Morgan Polikoff discuss accusations of discrimination in gifted-and-talented programs, Quality Counts, and lightning rod/tiger mom Michelle Rhee. Amber contemplates whether multiple-choice tests lead students to learn or forget.

Amber's Research Minute

Genna Angello, Elizabeth Bjork, Robert Bjork, and Jeri Little, “Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting,”

In an educational climate consumed with leaving no child behind and closing achievement gaps, America's highest performing and most promising students have too often been neglected. Our nation's persistent inability to cultivate our high-potential youth—especially tomorrow's leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on our long-term prosperity and well-being—poses a critical threat to American competitiveness. EXAM SCHOOLS: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett, presents a pioneering examination of our nation's most esteemed and selective public high schools—academic institutions committed exclusively to preparing America's best and brightest for college and beyond.

Like Exam Schools on Facebook

Buy Exam Schools from Amazon

Buy Exam Schools from Princeton University Press

Two years ago, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union by card check. Photo from ACTS Michigan.

(Updated January 17, 2013 for the Education Gadfly Weekly)

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools should be careful what it wishes for. Although a recent case before the National Labor Relations Board was decided in the direction favored by the Alliance, by vacillating opportunistically on the issue of whether charters are public or private the organization has weakened the charter movement’s long game.

Here’s what happened: Two years back, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union via card check—a power granted to public employees under Illinois labor law. In response, the charter school asked the NLRB to intervene, arguing that it was a privately run institution, not a “political subdivision” of the state—and, therefore, that attempts to organize its employees should fall under federal law and be done by secret ballot.

In March 2011, the Alliance, led at the time by Peter Groff, filed a brief supporting the Academy’s position. Charter schools are indeed public schools, the Alliance reasoned, but they’re run by private entities. Hence their employees should be treated like other private-sector employees. “To impose state labor law obligations on private charter school employers, even in a public school setting, is inconsistent with the goal of differentiating these schools from ‘traditional’ public schools,” the Alliance argued.

And the NLRB agreed with that position, though it did so by invalidating an earlier ruling from the director of its Chicago region (akin to a “lower court”). In the overturned ruling, the NLRB regional director had determined that even though the government hired and fired no one at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy, the charter school was still a political subdivision with responsibilities to the public. “CMSA and its Board of Directors are subject to statutory restrictions, regulations, and privileges that a private employer would not be subject to,” the regional director said. Not the least of those privileges is public funding.

Interestingly—and confusingly—his position resembled that taken by the National Alliance on a separate matter involving pensions in February 2012. At that time, the Alliance objected to proposed IRS regulations forcing states to prohibit charter school teachers from participating in government retirement plans. In its statement on the draft pension regulations—which would have reversed previous IRS rulings that charters are state “instrumentalities”—the Alliance argued,

The evidence is clear: charter schools are public schools; the degree of state control over charter schools and public funding of such schools justify amending the Proposed Regulation such that public charter schools are considered agencies or instrumentalities of the state for purposes of the Internal Revenue Service’s ‘governmental plan’ definition; and to hold otherwise would harm more than 93% of our national public charter school workforce.

So are they public or are they private? You cannot argue that charter schools are not governmental subdivisions for purposes of escaping hostile state labor laws and sundry public regulations in one breath, and then urge the IRS to deem charters “agencies or instrumentalities of the state” so that their employees can continue to benefit from government retirement plans in the next.

Such inconsistency does no favor to charter schools—particularly when it comes to funding. The Alliance had endeavored for years—and with mounting success—to codify the proposition that charter schools are public schools and therefore deserve all the funding and access to facilities that one would expect public schools to have. Their public-ness is also vital to their constitutionality in a number of states. But how can they be public schools if it is also contended that they’re private entities?

To be sure, the NLRB decision was limited to the Chicago charter school. But by helping to convince the board that even one such school is not an “instrumentality of the state” and therefore should come under federal labor jurisdiction, the Alliance may have subjected other charters to federal labor laws and unionization they never before had to worry about, thereby playing right into the hands of teacher unions keen to organize the instructors in these new schools. Bad.

Oh, how I would welcome and laud a nationwide education regime in which every high-ability student has access—beginning in Kindergarten—to teachers and classrooms ready and able to expedite and accelerate that youngster’s learning; in which every child moves at her own best pace through an individualized education plan and readily gets whatever help she needs to wind up truly college- and career-ready, whether that happens at age fifteen, eighteen, or twenty-one; and in which every teacher possesses the full range of skills and tools necessary to do right by every single pupil for whom he is responsible, regardless of their current level of achievement.

Millions of high-ability, academically promising youngsters are not receiving the challenging education they need to reach their maximum potential. Photo by mrcharly

That’s what we should aspire to—and work to make happen. Alas, that’s not how many places currently function. Among the victims of our present dysfunction are millions of high-ability, academically promising youngsters who are not getting the kinds of “gifted-and-talented” education that would likely do them the most good and help them to realize their maximum potential. (Collateral victims are a society and economy that thereby fail to make the most of this latent human capital.)

There’s no agreed-upon definition or metric for “giftedness,” so there are no truly satisfactory data on how many such youngsters reside in the United States. But assume, for this purpose, that we’re talking not about rare geniuses and prodigies but about the “talented tenth,” the one child in ten with the greatest potential for high-level cognitive achievement. That would translate to about 5.5 million girls and boys.

Nobody today can tell us how many of these kids actually make it into gifted-and-talented programs and classrooms, Advanced Placement (and International Baccalaureate) programs, specialized “exam schools,” and the myriad but motley other special offerings that do a decent job of serving such youngsters. (One encouraging datum: The College Board reports that 18 percent of 2011 high school graduates earned a score of 3 or better on at least one AP exam during their high school careers.)

States, districts, and individual schools differ dramatically in terms of the arrangements they make for such students, the extent and accessibility of their offerings, and the mechanisms by which they do and don’t successfully identify high-potential kids. Not many of them, however, are well-disposed towards creating separate classes, courses, programs, or schools for such youngsters—nor towards “ability grouping” them within schools and classrooms. Indeed, the education fraternity is dominated by the twin beliefs that “tracking is evil” and that “smart kids will do OK regardless.” The same fraternity is also under considerable pressure from federal and state policies to focus attention and available resources on low-achievers. As a result, high-potential kids are often neglected.

Insofar as teachers, schools, and programs do exist for them within U.S. public education, it’s well known that children from middle- and upper-middle class families with educated—and education-minded—parents are most apt to take advantage of such offerings and that poor and minority youngsters, particularly those without a lot of educational sophistication at home, are least likely to. Here is how the College Board frames the problem:

Hundreds of thousands of prepared students were either left out of an AP subject for which they had potential or attended a school that did not offer the subject. An analysis of nearly 771,000 graduates with AP potential found that nearly 478,000 (62 percent) did not take a recommended AP subject. Underserved minorities appear to be disproportionately impacted.

This is a great shame, of course, but it’s not exactly a surprise that more affluent kids are likelier to end up in gifted programs. Their families don't face the stress of poverty, and they tend to have two parents who read to their children, send them to preschool, etc. The socioeconomic achievement gap (see Mike Petrilli's appearance in Dr. Josh Starr's podcast) is well documented—and a corollary of it is that kids from more fortunate circumstances are more apt to end up in gifted classes. (Note, though, that Jessica Hockett and I found almost the same proportion of low-income youngsters in the country’s handful of “exam schools” as in the broader high school population in our book Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools.)

The problem begins well before high school, of course. Indeed, for many youngsters it begins at home in the early years, leading to ill-prepared (though possibly very bright) kindergartners and first graders, then to middle schools with gifted-and-talented classrooms dominated by kids whose parents did prepare and push them—and helped them navigate complicated access arrangements.

The New York Times on Sunday made a huge fuss about this as it plays out in our largest city—specifically, in a K–5 school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that is 63 percent black and Hispanic but in which such kids comprise only 32 percent of the enrollment in the gifted classes.

Following standard Times (and Upper West Side) ideology, reporter Al Baker chose to focus on the city’s mechanisms for screening and selecting kids for entry into its gifted programs (and high-powered high schools, etc.). The burden of his article is that New York’s education department discriminates against “children of color” via selection mechanisms that result in white (and Asian) youngsters receiving the best odds of accessing such programs and schools.

One may well yawn because this is so predictable a perspective. It’s also the wrong perspective. We might first acknowledge that many urban school systems would be thrilled—and praised—if a third of the kids in their gifted classrooms were black and Hispanic. But the more important point is that the supply of such classrooms is skimpy almost everywhere and America’s entire K–12 education enterprise does a lousy job of identifying and cultivating high-ability kids whose parents (for whatever reason) are not prepping and steering them into the available seats in such classrooms.

We’d be outraged—as would be the Times —if we learned that there weren’t enough special-ed classrooms, teachers, or programs to accommodate the population of children with disabilities. (Indeed, a big problem in the special-ed realm is over-identification of such kids.) But when it comes to high-ability students, instead of lamenting the under-identification challenge and the dearth of suitable classrooms, teachers, programs, and outreach efforts, the Times—and a lot of others—settle for playing the race card.

Shame on them.

Should we trust the judgment of pre-adolescents to decide for themselves what makes educational sense? Photo by slightly everything

While visiting a local high school as a liaison between my department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the high school’s Advanced Credit program, I had occasion to speak with its young principal—a newly minted doctor of education. I told him about a challenge facing those of us who teach in K–16 education: the difficulty of getting students to summon the patience, stamina, and will to read dense text, particularly book-length writings, in an age of instant gratification, sound-bites, jazzy graphics, and condensed versions of knowledge. In short, I asked him, do students still have the capacity for deep reading, followed by deliberation and reflection? Can they conduct serious discourse? The principal’s response struck me: “Today’s students are actually smarter and better than students of yesteryear, since students today get to choose their own readings.” Really? I immediately wondered whether we should trust the judgment of adolescents, much less pre-adolescents, to decide for themselves what makes educational sense. And for that matter, since when has the mere act of “choice” been a measure of intellect?

Bizarre as this principal’s comment seemed at the time, it was grounded in mainstream progressive thinking—the student-centered, active, discovery-learning paradigm—that goes back to Rousseau, Dewey, and Piaget and that was more recently promoted by disciples of Lucy Calkins’s “Reading and Writing Project” at Columbia University’s Teachers College. A 2009 New York Times article, “A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like,” noted the example of a Georgia teacher letting her seventh- and eighth-grade English students select their own books, reflecting “a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools” that “is catching on” in New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and other school districts. “Voice and choice,” as this perspective has been dubbed, means giving students themselves more choices. Indeed, voice and choice has been extended to preschoolers through the so-called “emergent curriculum,” “Reggio Emilia,” and other offshoots of progressive education. (Little Johnny and Shirley cannot find the potty, but somehow they are expected to think critically, including about what it is they should read—or even if they should read at all, as opposed to playing in the sandbox.)

Of course, there is much to be said for encouraging students to take ownership of their own education, to take personal responsibility for choices in their lives, to be active rather than passive learners, and to think more self-consciously about their abilities and interests. This all sounds well and good, but the educators pushing these ideas have been guilty of considerable pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and self-delusion.

First, the lectures on personal responsibility suddenly give way to a “kids-will-be-kids” mantra, with regard to enforcement of rules and standards. When students turn in late papers and flunk exams, for example, the consequences of their behavior can be easily reversed via grade-inflating redos, test retakes, and extra credit. Want to enforce cheating and plagiarism rules? You won’t get far in most American schools.

Second, unless one believes in the Orwellian logic of “less is more” promoted by Ted Sizer and others, student workloads are becoming lighter, not heavier. Popular perception and warnings about K–12 students being overburdened with homework are belied by trends that seem to be in the direction of assigning shorter books or articles (albeit with more pictures) and shorter papers. Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has noted that only about 10 percent of American high schools—predominantly located in affluent suburbs—maintain a culture of high academic expectations reflected in lots of homework. Rather, most fifteen- through seventeen-year-olds study less than one hour a day, while the homework done by elementary-schoolers takes “less time than watching an episode of ‘Hannah Montana Forever.’” A 2011 study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that only 39 percent of incoming college freshmen “report that they studied 6 or more hours a week on average as high school seniors.” Not surprisingly, this lack of academic engagement has carried over into college itself. In the 2010 study Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska found an overall 50-percent decline in the number of hours a student spends studying from previous decades; less than half of the students surveyed had ever written more than twenty pages for any class, and relatively few had been assigned more than forty pages of reading per week.

What is the likelihood that the voice-and-choice movement in K–12 will produce an increase in academic standards rather than further erosion? After all, as Diane Ravitch once framed the issue, “What child is going to pick up Moby Dick?” Where all this “choice” leads can be seen in the recent case of an Honors English course at my local high school where at least one student, entrusted with selecting a “great book” to read as the basis for a semester project, opted for Paris Hilton’s autobiography. I guess we should be impressed that this student was reading a book rather than watching and reporting on Entertainment Tonight. If you believe that the average student, when given a choice, will choose to read a 200-page book rather than a book half that size, or will choose to write a twenty-page paper rather than a ten-page paper, well, then you probably also believe in E.T. Have we carried the idea of empowering students with “choices” a bit too far? You be the judge.

On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama recommended a package of national reforms aimed at preventing tragedies like last month’s in Newtown, Connecticut. Amidst the high-profile ban on assault weapons and mandatory background checks on all gun buyers, he included a slew of proposals designed to help schools prepare for and respond to violent threats and improve access to quality mental-health services, including new money for new school counselors and training in identifying students with mental disabilities. And the President’s approval ratings leaped in response.

In the least surprising news since the New York Times told us that SAT scores correlate with family incomes, Arne Duncan has announced he will stay on as Secretary of Education during President Obama’s second term. (We can also blame the New York Times for tantalizing us with the faint hope that he would take on a much more surprising role.)

A new study found that students who struggle on college-readiness tests use different brain processes for simple problems than do high-achievers. Researchers asked forty-three students to perform basic arithmetic while having their brains scanned via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It turns out that low-performing students’ brains seemed to be performing calculations to solve the basic problems, while high-performing students appeared to solve the equations by rote memory. To our eye, this research buttresses the Common Core’s call for “automaticity” of math facts in the early grades.

A group of professors at Columbia University’s Teachers College are apprehensive about New York’s participation in the edTPA, a performance-based teacher-licensing test, which—among other things—requires teachers to record and analyze parts of their own instruction. Their concerns were threefold: the privacy of the children in the recordings; that not enough information is currently available on the qualifications of those who would score the exams; and the very notion that Pearson, a for-profit company, was contracted to administer the test. Sounds like sour grapes to us.

After profiles in PBS’s Frontline and the Washington Post, both of which coincided with StudentsFirst’s release of its 2013 State Policy Report Card, Michelle Rhee is squarely in the limelight. And while some love her and some love to hate her, it cannot be denied that her personal celebrity and willingness to play the heavy have helped attract attention to education and its reform. For more on Michelle Rhee, check out this week's Gadfly Show podcast.

In an educational climate consumed with leaving no child behind and closing achievement gaps, America's highest performing and most promising students have too often been neglected. Our nation's persistent inability to cultivate our high-potential youth—especially tomorrow's leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on our long-term prosperity and well-being—poses a critical threat to American competitiveness. EXAM SCHOOLS: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett, presents a pioneering examination of our nation's most esteemed and selective public high schools—academic institutions committed exclusively to preparing America's best and brightest for college and beyond.

Like Exam Schools on Facebook

Buy Exam Schools from Amazon

Buy Exam Schools from Princeton University Press

In an educational climate consumed with leaving no child behind and closing achievement gaps, America's highest performing and most promising students have too often been neglected. Our nation's persistent inability to cultivate our high-potential youth—especially tomorrow's leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on our long-term prosperity and well-being—poses a critical threat to American competitiveness. EXAM SCHOOLS: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett, presents a pioneering examination of our nation's most esteemed and selective public high schools—academic institutions committed exclusively to preparing America's best and brightest for college and beyond.

Like Exam Schools on Facebook

Buy Exam Schools from Amazon

Buy Exam Schools from Princeton University Press

Now seventeen years old, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts (QC) report grades states (and the U.S. as a whole) on six indicators: K–12 achievement; standards, assessment, and accountability; the teaching profession; school finance; “transitions and alignment” (which investigates early-childhood programming and college and career readiness); and the ever-controversial “chance for success” index. In this iteration, only the latter three have been updated—which strengthens the feeling that we’ve read this book before: The top five states retained their positions (with Maryland at the head with a B-plus), as did the lowest (South Dakota, D-plus). The U.S. average crept from 76.5 to 76.9. Even the most notable shifts aren’t exactly page-turners: West Virginia bumped from fourteenth to second on the school-finance indicator by upping its per-pupil funding $1,000. And Georgia earned the series’ first perfect score on “transitions and alignment” by embracing QC’s fourteen pet policies (like defining school or work readiness). Beyond the state rankings, this year’s QC also explores the intersection between school-discipline policies and student learning, calling attention to a key tradeoff: How do education leaders balance the need for a safe environment (not just by keeping weapons out of schools but by keeping other violence and disruption out, as well) against the benefits of keeping kids in school? Conventional wisdom says that too many students are being suspended or expelled—but “fixing” that problem might create new ones. If quality is to “count,” then classrooms need to be places of learning, not disruption.

SOURCE: Education Week, Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, January 10, 2013).

For over a decade, and almost entirely under the leadership of the prolific Paul Hill, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has promoted the “portfolio-district strategy,” in which districts manage a “portfolio” of diverse schools (charters, magnets, traditionals), each with a high degree of school-level autonomy and accountability. Since beginning this work, CRPE has written myriad reports on the PMM (portfolio-management model) and partnered with an ever-larger number of districts to help them roll out this strategy. Strife and Progress—a new book by Paul Hill and two current CRPE firecrackers, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross—compiles their immense amount of knowledge and experience. First, the authors outline and explain the seven components that any successful portfolio-district strategy must embrace: school choice, school autonomy, equitable school funding, talent-seeking and retention, support from independent groups, performance-based accountability, and public engagement. Drawing on case studies of several portfolio districts (mainly New York City, New Orleans, D.C., Chicago, and Denver), it then probes both the strategy’s promise and challenges. Clearly, for example, it cannot succeed without political support: The book is admirable in its acknowledgement of past public-relations failures within districts of this sort (e.g., the contentious tenures of Michelle Rhee and Cathie Black), and it expends much ink on the need to build relationships with local organizations and clearly communicate such measures as school closings and openings. Further, establishing the success of the portfolio model proves problematic, mostly because of numerous confounding variables. The authors do, however, offer concrete ways to deal with this complexity, including natural experiments through school lotteries and time-series analyses (which might, for instance, look at a student’s performance in one school versus another). The challenges, then, are real but not insurmountable. At a time when some people want to give up on urban districts entirely, the strategies set forth in Strife and Progress may offer this governance structure a fighting chance for success.

SOURCE: Paul T. Hill, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross, Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012).

Successful Common Core implementation will hinge on a number of factors. Among the largest of these will be getting the assessments right—in terms of both design and cost. Central to these issues are the controversial multiple-choice “bubble” tests, which are welcomed by some as fast and efficient means of gauging student knowledge and skills and derided by others as the cause for “teaching to the test” and superficial knowledge. This recent report found within the Journal of Psychological Science finds merit in the bubble test—if designed well. It explains findings from two small-sample studies (one had thirty-two participants, conducted out of UCLA, the other ninety-six, conducted out of Washington U.). The upshot: Both found that properly structured multiple-choice tests (those which offer plausible wrong answers alongside the correct response) “trigger the retrieval processes that foster test-induced learning and deter test-induced forgetting.” In other words, bubble tests with competitive responses trigger actual knowledge-retrieval processes rather than simple recognition processes—and do so better than cued-recall (fill-in-the-blank) tests. The bottom line is both cautiously encouraging. Multiple-choice tests—done correctly—can be a useful tool in an assessor’s kit (a point that we have previously argued). The CCSS assessment consortia would be wise to keep that in mind.

SOURCE: Genna Angello, Elizabeth Bjork, Robert Bjork, and Jeri Little, “Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting,” Psychological Science 23, no. 11 (October 2012): 1337-44.