Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Editorial: Testing the tests
Third-graders still will take a history SOL test; the state will examine full testing burden.
From the RoundTable blog
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Virginia will keep its third-grade history SOL, alas.
Count us among those critics who do not want to de-emphasize the subject, merely the high-stakes test for children so young. Teach history and test it in classrooms, yes; but reserve the pressures of state Standards of Learning tests for the building-block skills of reading and math.
That thinking did not prevail last week, though, when the state superintendent of public instruction bowed to an outcry from history lovers and lawmakers and dropped a plan to kill off that one SOL.
Still, state Superintendent Patricia Wright held fast to the idea of tweaking the entire testing regimen, according to published accounts, a review that appears to be in order. After a decade or more of working with the accountability standards, we expect Virginia educators have learned a thing or two about how the tests might work better.
To start, the state Board of Education last week approved a substitute plan to design a new third grade history and social studies SOL, to be ready in 2011. The board also agreed that the state education department should integrate content from core subjects, such as history, into the third-grade reading test.
"We'll be looking for ways to reduce the testing burden on our teachers, administrators and students," the Virginian-Pilot newspaper quotes Wright as saying, "but in a way that won't reduce accountability standards."
Virginia's SOLs are widely regarded as credible benchmarks for academic success. Yet Salem schools Superintendent Alan Seibert spoke at last week's meeting, the Pilot reported, and called the end-of-year assessment "the educational equivalent of an autopsy."
He urged the state to come up with better ways to measure student progress than to wait until a school year has gone by to judge results and devise tactics to address shortcomings.
If that is a concern in a district like Salem, where all the public schools are fully accredited by the state, it's easy to imagine that many other districts share a need for quicker identification, intervention and innovation to address learning problems.
The SOLs are here to stay, even the third grade history test. But that doesn't mean they can't change for the better.
