East Receives New Standardized Test Restrictions

April is testing month at East, which means that all month the library will be closed as East students take state assessment tests. The tests aren’t new. The subjects haven’t changed. The goal is still the same — for East to attain accreditation from the state by demonstrating student proficiency in math and reading. But come next fall, when the scores from these assessments are released, something will change: the standards by which the state of Kansas measures the school’s success on those assessments.

On April 2, East administrators presented information on the state’s new accreditation process to students and parents at a site council meeting. Associate principal Jeremy Higgin’s presentation marked the first step in the administration’s plan to educate the community on the new process. The new system was designed by the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) after the state’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Waiver was approved by the federal government last summer.

According to Higgins, the new accreditation system offers schools a more personalized process for demonstrating success through state assessments. Under the old NCLB accreditation process, all schools had to meet ever-rising federal benchmarks for proficiency, regardless of their level of academic performance. The new system takes into account a school’s academic standing by using the school’s assessment scores from the previous year to set goals for its assessment performance the following year. For instance, East’s high assessment scores mean that it has to make less improvement to meet its standards than a school with lots of room to improve. It’s this flexibility that has the East administration optimistic about the new accreditation process.
“It’s individualized for every single school,” associate principal Jeremy Higgins said. “This system is different because it’s all dependent on what category you fall in. If you’re a high performing school, then that’s taken into consideration with how much improvement you have to make.”
The new accreditation process relies on four new Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) — Achievement, Growth, Reducing the Gap and Reducing the Non-Proficient. Each AMO is a goal set for schools based on their Assessment Performance Index (API) — a grade point average of sorts for assessment scores — from the year before. This consideration for past performance presents schools with performance goals tailored to their academic standing.
Each AMO uses API scores to measure schools’ success and growth in different ways:

Achievement – A school must improve their overall API scores by an amount which is determined by its scores from the previous year

Growth – The state sets a median rate of growth in student scores based on the growth rates of all of the schools in the state. The schools with growth rates greater than the median rate meet this AMO, and those with rates less than the median rate do not make their AMO. By design only half of the schools in the state can meet this AMO.

Reducing the Gap – A school must reduce the gaps between the API of the lowest scoring 30 percent of its students and the state benchmarks. The gaps between the scores of the lowest 30 percent and the state benchmark scores must be cut in half over a period of six years.

Reducing the Non-Proficient – A school must cut its number of non-proficient or failing students in half over a period of six years.
Adding to the new system’s flexibility is the fact that schools only have to make one out of four AMOs in order to be accredited. This benefits high performing schools like East, who will have trouble meeting their AMOs for growth due to a lack of room for improvement. Even if East fails to meet its growth AMO, it can still attain accreditation by simply meeting any one of the other AMOs.

While beneficial to East’s pursuit of accreditation, this lenient requirement has Higgins concerned about the community’s perception of the school’s success.

“Is it a big deal that we don’t make [the growth AMO]?” Higgins said. “No. It means that we’re doing really, really well. But as you can imagine, this is where educating our community and our students is so important. When a newspaper catches hold of this and says, ‘Shawnee Mission East only made one out of four AMOs. Oh no’ — it’s OK.”

While Higgins sees the new accreditation process as an improvement over the old NCLB system, he does see a potential drawback in the number of unanswered questions surrounding the AMO system.

“There are a lot of unknowns that over the course of the next few years we’ll get answers for,” Higgins said. “I think there were a lot of things that as districts started to look at this, [raised] a lot of questions, and I hope that the state’s looking at those.”

The amount of unanswered questions regarding the new system is nerve-wracking for some teachers such as sophomore English teacher Kristen Fry.

“I care about my kids,” Fry said. “I want them to succeed. While I don’t necessarily love teaching to the test, I do want them to do well on the test. So yeah, it’s a little disconcerting.”

With the new accreditation system and new assessments coming next year and the following year due to Common Core, there’s much uncertainty surrounding the assessments. For now, however, Higgins advised the faculty to prepare for the tests the same way they always have.

“If we prepare our kids to do the best they possibly can, teach them the curriculum, give them the confidence they need to take the tests, we’re gonna do OK,” Higgins said.