Last week while many of us were busy monitoring road conditions and watching wind chill temperatures we were hit by a storm that the best meteorologist could not have predicted, and it is was a doozy! The winds of change are once again blowing in the State of Michigan and it has left many of us in education feeling numb. In a joint announcement from the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) and the department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) We were told that the SAT will replace the ACT as the college assessment in Michigan. That's right, Beginning in the Spring of 2016 11th graders in Michigan will no longer take the ACT.
Rather, for at least a three-year period, the state will be
administering the SAT.
I believe I speak for all of us in education when I say that this news
came as a surprise and has left many of us feeling left out
in the cold. While we were aware that the college entrance portion of the state's high school assessment was out for bid there was little reason to expect a change. After all the ACT has served served the roll since 2007. Then, approximately 45 minutes before this press release a rumor began to
circulate that news was forthcoming on assessment. Still nobody saw this coming. Cold!
According to the press release the College Board, the "corporation" behind the SAT, won the three-year competitively-bid contract because "The College Board’s bid was
$15.4 million less over the three-year contract than the next bidder and
scored 10 percentage points higher by the Joint Evaluation Committee
(JEC)".
Who was on this JEC? Well In addition to staff from MDE and DTMB, this "evaluation committee"
also " included members representing the education community, including a
high school principal; a local school superintendent; a testing and
assessment consultant from an intermediate school district; and a vice
president from a Michigan community college." It appears none of the leading organizations in our field, including the MASSP, were consulted or invited to be part of the conversation. In other words a decision was made that will impact hundreds of thousands of students based on the opinions of a group of bureaucrats, four individuals loosely representing the "education community" and a bottom line. Brrrr!
Am I shocked by this? Not really! Educational policy in our state is a lot like the weather...you never know what you are going to get from day to day. In twenty five years in public education I have seen many decisions made for the masses by a few that were politically and/or financially motivated. Unfortunately we live in a world where the bottom line or political gamesmanship often trumps what is best for our kids and the opinions of those of us who know best.
Am I disappointed by this? Absolutely, and here is why First, this is not about the test. Like the ACT, the SAT is a globally recognized college admission test. Unfortunately my school and district, like most in Michigan has made significant financial and time
commitments to the ACT. For the past seven years much of our professional development and professional dialog has centered around the ACT, and for good reason. The ACT has long been recognized by the Colleges and Universities in our state as the measure for admission. Because of this our students and families know the ACT and recognize the importance of the assessment. Our students are motivated, they work hard at it and they have grown. We know you can't place a value of that level of "buy in" when it comes to student performance.
We also can't place a value on the information we have garnered from the ACT. The ACT with Explore and Plan have provided us true longitudinal data and allowed us to "compare apples to apples" when assessing student growth in grades 7-12. The creation of ACT Aspire for grades offers great potential to do the same with grades 3-12. As a result in the past seven years we have become data driven. The information and insights we have garnered have promoted changes and improvement to our practice. I am concerned concerned about the lack of carry over and
consistency in data- we've shown growth on the ACT every years since its
inception in 2008…now we start over in terms of building longitudinal
data.
I am also disappointed with the timing. These winds of change have been constant in Michigan for several years. I have written before about the challenges we face planning for the implementation of Mstep
this Spring which required 7 hours of additional testing and now we will need to
gear up for the SAT starting in 2016. It does not give us much lead
time to prepare our current 9th and 10th graders who we've been prepping
for the ACT. Additionally, the SAT is being "retooled" for 2016 so as MASSP Director Wendy Zdeb-Roper pointed out "essentially
Michigan has bought a new car that hasn't driven off the assembly line". Add to this the adoption of the Common Core Standards; ongoing changes to the Michigan Merit Curriculum and changes to our educator evaluation system and you have some blustery conditions.
This all being
said the decision has been made and as educators we will do whatever
it takes to get our students prepared for the challenge. In our profession we don't always have the luxury of time to respond to change, to grieve. There is no hand wringing allowed. The reality is that none of us got into education because we had a passion to
administer the ACT or any other standardized test to our students rather we got
into education because we believed in the importance of public education. As my fellow MASSP board member Steve Carlson said in a communication to his staff " No decisions today or tomorrow
about standardized testing should change our personal educational
philosophies, nor should they make us question the positive impact we
have on our students' lives".
So Bundle up Michiganders! The weather is changing. But than again, we are used to that!
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