On February 25, 2015, Perrysburg Schools Superintendent Mr. Thomas L. Hosler traveled to Columbus to provide the following testimony in favor of Senate Bill 3 to the Ohio Senate Education Committee.
Thank you Madame Chairperson Lehner, Vice Chair Hite, Ranking Minority Member Sawyer and all members of the Education Committee for allowing me the opportunity to testify today in favor of Senate Bill 3. My name is Tom Hosler and I am Superintendent of Perrysburg Schools, a school district with about 5,000 students in Wood County. I have been a school superintendent for over 15 years: eight years in Michigan and over seven with Perrysburg Schools. I am also Vice-Chair of the Alliance for High Quality Education. I am very grateful to Senators Hite and Faber for sponsoring this bill.
Imagine for a moment that there are two patients sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room. Both are there to get a physical examination as required by their place of employment.
Both are called back to an examination room and are subjected to a variety of tests to measure their health: blood pressure, cholesterols, weight, pulse, pulmonary function, blood sugar, triglycerides, etc. At the end of the examination, both patients are told that the results will be sent to their respective employers who will then share the results with them in 7-8 months.
One patient is not satisfied with that and decides to pay out-of-pocket for a few tests so that she may immediately learn about her health. This person wants to be healthy and to make changes in her diet and fitness now based on the results of the tests.
The other person is just fine with getting the results in 7-8 months. This person feels good and he is happy with his level of wellbeing.
Seven to eight months later as promised the company nurse shares the results of the physicals with both patients. For the one patient, the results are not a surprise and for the last seven to eight months, she has been diligent in making lifestyle changes and knows exactly where she stands regarding her health. The data provided by the company is old and frankly isn’t very helpful to her, unlike the data from the tests she paid for that provided immediate feedback and caused her to make adjustments to her lifestyle; the old data is not relevant.
The other patient, well he is dead… No, he gets the results from the company nurse and is surprised to learn he has some troubling health issues that he was unaware of until now – some 7 to 8 months later. All this time, this patient has made no adjustments to his health or lifestyle. In fact, the lack of information about his health condition for 7- 8 months has further deteriorated his wellbeing, making it just that more difficult to address his deficiency.
Which patient is better off? Clearly the one who collected data on her own health, took steps to remediate her lifestyle based on the immediate data and again assessed her progress.
In Ohio, this describes exactly where we are today with state and local assessment.
Like the patient who doesn’t want to wait, Perrysburg School District administers local diagnostics for our K-3 students. Because we are a high-performing district, we do not use the state diagnostic. If the state requires us to use a diagnostic in the future, it will significantly impact instructional time. What we know about the diagnostics we already use is how to make impactful instructional decisions. We know this because we have longitudinal data. The new kindergarten readiness assessment is a state-required assessment that took considerable time away from important instruction and provided no more useful information than the previous shorter KRA-L assessment. We use STAR and AIMSWEB and have significant history and familiarity with these assessments and how we need to proceed with students who fall below local and state norms.
Perrysburg pays for outside assessments such as AIMSWEB, STAR Reading & Math and Fountas & Pinnell Benchmarking and administers them in Kindergarten through 8th grade (AIMSWEB K-2, STAR 3-8, FP K-5). We also develop our own common assessments in core subjects in grades K-12 and Student Learning Objective (SLO) assessments in non-state tested subjects K-12. We use this combination of additional purchased tests and in-house developed tests so that teachers have the data needed to evaluate students and make adjustments in their instruction to meet each student’s individual needs.
These are not the only assessments that Perrysburg purchases. In situations where we need specific data to make determinations about services, such as gifted placement, students are given CogAT (3rd grade), Iowa Aptitude Algebra Test (6th grade) and the IOWA Reading and Math Achievement tests (K-6 acceleration).
We also currently use AIMSWEB, STAR and other nationally normed assessments for teacher evaluation. These companies were held to a high standard in the selection process for approval for this purpose by the Ohio Department of Education. Since this is the case, then couldn’t we use them for our district measures as well?
In total, Perrysburg Schools will spend over $35,000 this year on extra services or tests that will better enable our teachers to meet the individual needs of our students. Perrysburg is not special in this regard.
We do this despite the fact that the Federal government, through No Child Left Behind, requires the state to test our students in Math and English Language Arts (ELA) in grades 3 through 12 and Science in grades 5, 8 and High School. In addition to the federal requirements, the State requires writing diagnostics in grades 1, 2 and 3; mathematics diagnostics in grades 1 and 2; reading diagnostics in grades K-3; and state Social Studies tests in grades 4, 6 and High School. All of this student testing data, while helpful in measuring our district’s curriculum and ensuring our instruction aligns with the state standards, is not an effective tool to use to help improve instruction in real time.
Our taxpayers are hit twice for testing. Once by the costs associated at the State level and then the costs of our local need for immediate feedback – like the patient in the doctor’s office who doesn’t want to wait months to see whether or not she is healthy.
While reducing the percentage of test time is a great first step, the question should be why are we testing? The goal should be measuring student growth in a way that helps her/his learning as well as measuring the effectiveness of the school district and holding it accountable. If we were able to use our local assessments for the real-time feedback we need and then report those scores to the state instead of then administering separate state tests that measure the same standards, we would be meeting our goals, and we would use much less time and capital resources than we do today.
To reduce the amount of instructional time lost due to testing, why can’t the state access the results from the Ohio Department of Education-approved tests that many districts already use daily? Unlike the state tests, these tests do not require building-wide and disruptive schedules that have a detrimental impact on the learning environment that far exceeds the actual time spent taking the tests.
Focusing only on the amount of time that these various tests take to administer is missing the point. Having the State count the minutes that school districts spend on these valuable, locally administered assessments and perhaps limiting them is yet a further encroachment on local control. The best path forward is to develop an alternative to the current state assessment system where the state could utilize the data we collect from ODE-approved assessments we already administer on a regular basis to ensure we are meeting Ohio’s New Learning Standards, as well as our obligation to ensure students achieve their greatest potential.
Madame Chair, thank you for your time.