State Board to Resume Normal Testing And Proposes “Transitional Year” for Accountability
On Thursday, the State Board of Education (SBE) voted unanimously to return state testing to its pre-pandemic scope this year and to pursue a “transitional year” for school and district accountability. The board took the action to clarify plans for testing this spring and to inform legislators who are expected to consider issues related to the state accountability system in the upcoming legislative session. These changes would eventually affect the data available to charter school authorizers evaluating the academic performance of charter schools.
Details of the changes are described in a SBE press release. Language of the board’s resolutions, a deck presenting information on state studies of the proposed changes, and a memo summarizing the studies are also available. A CACSA webinar on these topics will be scheduled in January.
The State Board intends to restart testing in all grades and subjects prescribed in law. Because of the pandemic state testing was cancelled for the 2019-20 school year and scaled down in 2020-2021 under a waiver approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Without further change to law or a new waiver, Colorado will resume administering the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) assessments in English language arts and math to students in grades three through eight as well as the PSAT in grades nine and 10 and the SAT in grade 11. Science assessments are also scheduled to be given in grades five, eight and 11 and the CELA ACCESS tests will be administered as usual. The state can administer these tests without any statutory change.
While testing is scheduled to return to its pre-pandemic structure, the details of a “transitional year” for the state accountability system would involve a mix of practices allowed under current law and changes requiring legislative action. Through this potential mix, the state board’s proposed transitional accountability system would:
• Resume calculating and reporting performance frameworks for schools and districts;
• Assign school and district plan type ratings of Turnaround, Priority Improvement, Improvement, Performance, as well as the Distinction rating available to districts;
• Direct school improvement resources, including the School Transformation Grant, based on 2022 results;
• Not automatically advance any school or district on the accountability clock and allow schools and districts to request reconsideration of their rating to move off the clock; and
• Enable the board to use 2022 frameworks to evaluate possible new or different directed action for any school or district with current state board orders for improving chronically low student achievement.
In addition, the board voted to support board-level policy:
• Requiring a 90% total participation rate on 2022 state and local assessments for those requesting the state to reconsider their plan type rating; and
• Maintaining 2019 cut scores for the performance frameworks.
The state conducted two studies to inform the board deliberations. Explanations and results of the studies are outlined in the memo and deck linked above.
The first study projected how many schools or districts would have enough data to receive a rating. Schools or districts with fewer than 20 students in a grade traditionally use three-year averages to aggregate enough students to calculate their ratings. With only one year’s worth of growth data, about 390 schools that would otherwise require a three-year rating could not be rated.
The second study explored the impact of missing data on the stability of accreditation ratings. Using pre-pandemic data that included all tests and grades from 2019, the study modelled the impact of removing data from 2019 dataset of the corresponding tests that were not given in 2021. The accreditation ratings given the complete range of tests were compared to the ratings that would have been generated using only a portion of the test scores from the same year. Using this method, about 90 percent of school ratings did not change, and roughly equal numbers of schools increased or decreased when ratings were based only on data comparable to data available from last year’s test.
According to the CDE analysis:
• Most schools and districts will have enough data to calculate a performance framework, while more than usual will not;
• Available data stands in for missing data fairly well;
• The missing data introduces some differences in calculations;
• Low student participation may impact accuracy and representativeness of plan type assignments; and
• The cumulative effect of these findings should be considered when examining options for 2022 accountability.
Given the heightened stakes that charter schools face when authorizers use state accountability data to make renewal or closure decisions, authorizers should track these potential changes and activity by the legislature. Authorizers may want to reconsider how charter contracts and renewal processes integrate state testing data and accreditation ratings during renewal processes.
CACSA will continue to track these developments and will convene authorizers to discuss their implications.