Yesterday’s post pointed toward a complete change in how Maine goes about testing.
Around the same time as we came upon that news, we also came upon an exceedingly useful bit of advice that we’d like to share:
(via Criggo)
Back now to our regularly-scheduled post!
One question that comes to mind when we ponder the adoption of the New England Common Assessment Program is what the implications will be for the Maine Learning Results and for Maine’s standing vis-a-vis No Child Left Behind.
We note this introduction to the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s NECAP page:
State testing in Rhode Island has changed dramatically in response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). To meet these requirements, Rhode Island partnered with Vermont and New Hampshire to develop Grade Level Expectations (GLEs) and to design the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP). One of the most important goals of this partnership was to make these assessments instructionally relevant by providing information to school administrators, teachers, and parents to help them make informed decisions about student instructional needs.
Are the much-vaunted Maine Learning Results, developed through a somewhat-participatory process, overthrown?
Are they replaced by the Vermont/Rhode Island/New Hampshire Grade Level Expectations?
What in turn is their relationship to Maine’s 2007 Grade Level Expectations?
Update: Matthew Stone, at The Report Card
Mary Callan, Principal of Maranacook Community Middle School in Readfield, said the Maine Educational Assessment hasn’t been reliable in recent years in comparing student performance from year to year.
In fact, the 2007-08 school year was the first year the state was able to establish a trend in MEA scores since changing scoring methods three years ago. The previous two school years, school officials could not make statistically significant year-to-year comparisons.
If Maine applies the same statistical standards when adopting the New England test, educators would once again have to wait three years before they’d be able to make sense of Maine students’ scores.