Out in Nebraska, the land is wide and open, and the NCLB testing is unorthodox: Nebraska says "no" to mandatory statewide testing.
With criticism mounting over implementation of the federal accountability law and states scrambling to overhaul their testing systems to comply, Nebraska alone has succeeded in saying no to mandatory statewide tests.
The state has persuaded federal education officials to approve the nation's most unorthodox assessment system, which allows school districts to use portfolios to measure student progress.
For this, Nebraska Education Commissioner Douglas Christensen has been hailed as a visionary and derided as an obstructionist.
"I don't give a damn what No Child Left Behind says," Christensen said. "I think education is far too complex to be reduced to a single score. We decided we were going to take No Child Left Behind and integrate it into our plan, not the other way around. If it's bad for kids, we're not going to do it."
The article then mentions that Nebraska's portfolio assessments are, like most such systems, "expensive...time-consuming for teachers and it makes comparisons among districts difficult." The only reason it works as well as it does there is because the school districts are small (only 159 of Nebraska's 517 school districts are large enough to trigger federal attention) and the populations are homogenous. True to form, though, NCLB critics are insisting that Nebraska's system can work for other districts and states.
Nebraska's 517 school districts design their own assessment systems: a portfolio of teachers' classroom assessments, district tests that measure how well children are meeting locally developed learning standards, a state writing test and at least one nationally standardized test included as a reality check.
So they haven't opted out of standardized testing altogether. That's wise.
These are submitted to state education officials and a team of outside testing experts for review, and the districts are rated not just on the proficiency of their students but on the quality and reliability of their testing portfolio.
Also wise. This is why this plan satisfies the NCLB requirements. Interesting, too, that in a time when time-crunch complaints are constantly featured in news articles, Nebraska's teachers don't mind taking the extra time for portfolio work:
Sixth-grade teacher Melissa McCain knows some of her Nebraska colleagues think their jobs would be easier with state-ordered tests. But after the year she spent teaching in Texas, where children take high-stakes tests every year, she's convinced the extra work beats the alternative.
"Everything was about the test in Texas. The pressure was great. I would have kids who got sick on test day, they were so stressed out," McCain said. "Here, we are assessing our kids every day. I have more flexibility to meet the needs of individual kids."
There's nothing wrong with that. The high-stakes tests were developed, in essence, to force schools that were doing little or no assessment to keep better track of performance, and to allow states with very heterogenous populations to compare performance across districts. In Nebraska, it seems they've found a happy medium that works for Nebraska. But it would be a mistake to assume that this sort of assessment would be feasible or affordable or valid elsewhere.