This was a chance, they said, to come up with fresh ideas and find alternatives to more and more standardized testing, and all that means for how teachers teach and students learn. But when the time came for the State Board of Education to come up with its plan for evaluating public schools to comply with ESSA, innovation was absent without an excuse. How students do on standardized tests will still be the main way North Carolina evaluates its schools.
Bill Cobey, the state board chairman, has said the board had little choice. The problem, it seems is that state legislators are in love with a system under which schools get letter grades of A through F based mostly on how many of their students pass the state exams.
They are so enamored of the system that they overrode Gov. The lawmakers wanted to keep that A-F grading system, so, instead of coming up with a more innovative approach themselves, or allowing the state board to do so, they tweaked the grading system to comply with ESSA standards.
In extreme cases, schools could be closed. ESSA still requires standardized tests, but it says that states also can use other factors to evaluate schools and individual students. Used in moderation, standardized testing is one good way to see how a student is doing and determine areas where she might need extra help. When too much depends only on test scores, however, testing can become an obstacle to learning. Time that could be used for creative teaching and opportunities that might make children love learning is eaten up by teaching to the test, practice tests and retests.
Sometimes, children who need the most individual attention instead are subjected to the most standardized pressure. And while it can be useful in assessing individuals, standardized testing is less effective in evaluating individual teachers or entire schools.
