By Krysta Huber
Rockbridge area school administrators and teachers said they are encouraged by talk of standardized testing reform in Richmond. Earlier this month, two delegates introduced legislation that would reduce the number of Standards of Learning tests required of students in Virginia.
Students must take 34 SOL tests, beginning in third grade and continuing through high school. But Delegates Thomas “Tag” Greason, R-Loudon County, and Rob Krupicka, D-Alexandria, want to lower the number to 26 tests.
One way Greason has proposed to do that is by eliminating science and history tests given in the third and fourth grades.
Students afraid to be wrong
Frances Richardson, a fourth grade teacher at Lexington’s Waddell Elementary School, supports Greason’s proposal. She said students shouldn’t be tested on history and science in elementary school because the material they’re expected to learn isn’t age-appropriate.
“It’s too difficult for the children to understand,” Richardson said. “So we’re obliged to make them memorize things.”
Vicky Saunders, a fifth grade teacher at Waddell, agrees. Saunders said she believes that the SOL tests have affected her curriculum so much that her students are afraid to be wrong.
“I think what we’ve done with SOLs is discouraged critical thinking,” Saunders said. “And we’re teaching them that there’s only one right way, which is wrong.”
Saunders, who has been teaching at Waddell for 16 years, said she believes she was a better teacher before SOL tests were required.
“I felt like I saw real growth in my students as far as being able to look at things critically, analyze things and make decisions based on experience that they had with material,” she said.
Project-based Assessments
Krupicka’s proposals in the bill would replace some of the social studies and science tests at the elementary and middle school levels with project-based assessments.
To test a student’s knowledge of the industrial revolution, a current SOL test would provide a picture from that time period and ask the student to answer a multiple- choice question. But a project-based assessment would require that the student deliver a speech using visual aids to argue why he or she would have wanted to live either in a city or on a farm during that time period.
Lexington City Schools Superintendent Dan Lyons said he believes project-based assessments would be more appropriate in Lexington, where there is a wide range of student ability.
Lyons said the tests don’t account for progress among students who start the school year behind their classmates.
“You could be a third grade teacher and have a student who gets to your class and is reading at the first grade level and only understands math at the first grade level,” Lyons said. “And by the time he or she finishes your class, he or she can be almost at third grade level but they’re not going to pass the third grade SOL.”
Saunders added that the SOLs attempt to apply one formula of assessment to every student.
“The way I look at it is that on the state level they don’t consider what each of my students need,” she said. “They care that everyone in the state of Virginia gets this score.”
State raises the bar
The latest proposals for revision to the SOLs come just a few years after other changes were made. In 2011, the rigor of the tests was increased. Application questions, like word problems for mathematics, were added.
And as rigor increased, students’ scores fell in the Rockbridge area and throughout the state.
Ryan Barber, principal of Central Elementary School in Rockbridge County, said he feels that schools are always trying to catch up to the next standard of the test.
“The trouble is that the state keeps wanting to bring it up a notch,” Barber said.
But teachers and administrators said they aren’t involved in the process of increasing the rigor because they aren’t involved in making specific changes to the tests.
School officials don’t want Pearson, the company that develops the SOLs, to be the major group responsible for writing test questions.
“You need to have people who have been in the trenches, know what they’re looking for, not necessarily somebody from Pearson,” said Buena Vista Public Schools Superintendent John Keeler.
Test-revision committees
The bill attempts to address this issue by formally creating revision committees – made up of educators and other field experts – for each subject covered on the SOLs. The committees would meet at least two years before the Virginia Board of Education reviewed a particular test.
But Saunders said that a few years ago she was a member of a similar committee to suggest changes to the social studies SOLs.
“I feel it’s like a lot of things in communities where you’re asked for input but you’re not really considered,” she said. “It’s there for them to say, ‘Well we asked about it.’”
Phillip Thompson, Maury River Middle School principal and assistant superintendent of Rockbridge County Schools, echoed Keeler’s sentiment.
“One common recurring complaint I hear year after year is that we have people in Richmond who are politicians making decisions and most of them are not educators,” Thompson said. “To be able to have educator input is invaluable.”
The legislation represents one of the first bipartisan efforts in support of SOL reform in recent years. And Keeler said that is reassuring.
“I think there’s movement on both sides of the aisle to help K-12 [education],” he said. “We will know shortly just how much help that is.”
If the legislation is passed, Richardson said she believes the effects will be immediate.
“I think what they’re going to find is that miraculously, scores go up with fewer amount of tests we have to teach to in the early grades,” she said. “I think the proof in that pudding will come pretty quickly.”