SC PIE - Feature Article

We have all read in the newspapers that there is great dissatisfaction with the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test. Every year when the PACT is administered and when school report cards are published the criticisms and complaints about the PACT are lead stories on the news. While some have called for its abolition and others have called for a scaling back of the scope of tests administered, I would suggest that changing the Education Accountability Act’s (EAA) required tests isn’t necessarily the solution.

The EAA rightly points to the Academic Standards adopted by the State Board of Education with the advice and consent of the Education Oversight Committee as directing instruction and assessment. It also calls for an assessment system that informs instruction, measures improved performance and informs continued professional development. This is quite a large task. In this context having easily understood and applied academic standards isn’t merely helpful; it is essential.

If we are going to hold students, teachers and schools accountable for ensuring that everyone is making academic progress, then we need to make sure that everyone understands what is expected. Having unclear standards is the equivalent of telling an athlete and her coach that they are going to compete in the Olympics but they will find out at the games in what events they will compete and only after they compete will they know how the event was scored.

As Dr. Bror Saxberg presented to our English Language Arts Standards Committee of the Board of Education in July, our standards must be crisp, easily understood and focused so teachers and students have enough time to master concepts and skills. By these criteria, we come up short.

For example we expect a 4th grade teacher to cover 38 individual indicators in Social Studies with some as complex as “Explain how conflicts and cooperation among the Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans influenced colonial events including the French and Indian Wars, slave revolts, Native American wars, and trade.” This causes teachers to have to make their best guess as to what each standard really covers and what a likely test question would be.

To compound this problem, the standards don’t have guidance for relative emphasis.What is foundational and needs to be explored in depth and what can be touched on for further study in a later grade? There may be “support documents” that “give a clearer picture” to teachers, but parents need to be able to know what their child is expected to know and be able to do.

Lack of specificity in the standards results in a lack of specificity in the PACT reporting. Whether it is because the teacher emphasized standards that weren’t emphasized on the PACT or because the test writers and the teachers had different understandings of what a standard meant, the result is the same: we aren’t really measuring what we think we are measuring. This leads to incredible frustration for those who really are trying to improve and who witnessed real academic gains in the classroom and don’t see these gains reflected in the PACT results.

Because our standards are too broad and not well-defined we have set before our teachers and students a Herculean task and, frankly, are unable to derive reliable information as to how well students have mastered all the standards set for their grade. I don’t believe we really know how many of our children are “prepared to be successful in the next grade” as a result of the PACT.

The solution, though, isn’t to throw out the PACT. Just because one scale isn’t accurate doesn’t mean that I need to swear off all scales and just hope that I lose weight. Just knowing that I am getting on a scale helps me stay motivated in exercise and eating habits. Rather, I need to find a better scale and keep up exercise and healthy eating habits.

In this case, having the State Board of Education and Education Oversight Committee revise our Academic Standards to focus them, provide guidance as to relative emphasis and make them universally accessible would drive improvement of the PACT to make it truly “objective and reliable” and useful for improving instruction for all students. The testing requirements of the Education Accountability Act don’t need revision, our Academic Standards and test blueprints do.

Kristin Maguire is Governor Mark Sanford’s Appointee to the State Board of Education