Nebraska schools skip mandatory tests

By Tracy Dell'Angela
Chicago Tribune

	CANDICE C. CUSIC / CHICAGO TRIBUNE Ben Wachholtz, a second-grader at Portal Elementary School in La Vista, Neb., reads an "Arthur" book to prepare for a fluency exam.
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Macy Morrison, 8, opens an online portfolio to review her scores on math problems that test her reasoning skills. Kyle Dunbar reads to a fifth-grade classmate, who will offer suggestions about how to improve his fluency.

In schools on the outskirts of Omaha, this is how teachers decide whether their students have mastered reading and math under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Here, students aren't pushed to do well on 50-minute tests that will determine whether their teachers and their schools are considered successful — the kind of pressure faced across the nation as children take their states' standardized achievement tests.

With criticism mounting over implementation of the federal accountability law and states scrambling to overhaul their testing systems to comply, Nebraska alone has succeeded in saying no to mandatory statewide tests.

The state has persuaded federal education officials to approve the nation's most unorthodox assessment system, which allows school districts to use portfolios to measure student progress.

For this, Nebraska Education Commissioner Douglas Christensen has been hailed as a visionary and derided as an obstructionist.

"I don't give a damn what No Child Left Behind says," Christensen said. "I think education is far too complex to be reduced to a single score. We decided we were going to take No Child Left Behind and integrate it into our plan, not the other way around. If it's bad for kids, we're not going to do it."

Nebraska's system is far from perfect; it is expensive, it is time-consuming for teachers and it makes comparisons among districts difficult. The system works here in part because of the state's small school districts and homogeneous population.

But critics of No Child Left Behind — and the high-stakes testing mania it has spawned — say Nebraska's example proves that educators can create a different kind of accountability system that meaningfully measures student learning.

Nebraska's 517 school districts design their own assessment systems: a portfolio of teachers' classroom assessments, district tests that measure how well children are meeting locally developed learning standards, a state writing test and at least one nationally standardized test included as a reality check.
 
These are submitted to state education officials and a team of outside testing experts for review, and the districts are rated not just on the proficiency of their students but on the quality and reliability of their testing portfolio.

Federal education officials said Nebraska's system passed muster because the state's constitution guarantees local control over school accountability and the state was able to demonstrate that the assessments were valid and reliable. However, Eugene Hickok, U.S. undersecretary of education, said he still favors statewide testing systems to ensure that standards are comparable in every school.

That method "has a certain efficiency that most states prefer," Hickok said. "But the federal law doesn't say you can only have one test. People shouldn't think No Child Left Behind is the only way you hold students accountable or measure student achievement."

Nationwide, teachers in thousands of districts already use such comprehensive portfolios; they just are not used by state and federal officials to determine whether the schools are making academic progress.

At Portal Elementary in La Vista, second-grader Macy Morrison can see for herself that she's making progress. She has been taking tests since school started. By the end of the year, her teacher will send the district 33 measures of Macy's progress in reading, writing and math.

During a recent visit, Macy was reading an "Arthur" book into a microphone on a computer. This test measures Macy's fluency — a rare example in which speech is actually measured for state standards — and when she's finished she knows exactly what she should do to improve.

"My expression was just right, but I'm still getting there on my smoothness because I had a lot of stops," Macy said, clicking to a bar chart of her progress over the year. Tests make Macy a little nervous, but she knows they are important — and her reasons have nothing to do with the reputation of her school.

"We take these tests so we can learn more and the teachers can see how we're doing," she said.

Sixth-grade teacher Melissa McCain knows some of her Nebraska colleagues think their jobs would be easier with state-ordered tests. But after the year she spent teaching in Texas, where children take high-stakes tests every year, she's convinced the extra work beats the alternative.

"Everything was about the test in Texas. The pressure was great. I would have kids who got sick on test day, they were so stressed out," McCain said. "Here, we are assessing our kids every day. I have more flexibility to meet the needs of individual kids."

Despite all the hand-wringing over the federal law, No Child Left Behind isn't even a factor for most of the schools in this largely rural state. Only 159 of Nebraska's 517 school districts are on the federal radar; the others are so small they don't trigger the law's threshold of 30 students testing in any one group — whether by grade, race or income level.

One of the criticisms of the Nebraska system is that it doesn't guarantee uniform standards across districts — thus, a student might pass reading in one district but not be able to meet standards in another. Christensen said Nebraska's system is unusual because it rests on a revolutionary concept: that teachers know better than tests whether students are learning, and that they can be trusted to make that happen.

"Educators have never been in control of their craft," he said. "What makes our system work is it speaks to the heart of teachers."

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