Dive Brief:
- The new assessment program at the Brooklyn New School — which has 95% student opt-out rates from New York's standardized tests — is performance-based, with students presenting work to a panel of adults.
- DNAinfo reports the highly sought after elementary school opposes standardized tests and is developing this performance-based system as an alternative assessment model, though it is still a work in progress as educators figure out how to use their rubric for student evaluation.
- So far, students get a qualitative assessment of their presentation and the work leading up to it, and they are judged based on their own personal progress rather than against the performance of their peers or a standardized norm.
Dive Insight:
One of the early civil rights goals of standardized testing was to shine a spotlight on the students schools were leaving behind. With funding tied to certain expectations for student success, schools could no longer leave new immigrant students or special education students or low-income students to fail. The Common Core State Standards aimed to develop a uniform set of standards that students in every school in all the states that adopted them would be expected to meet, and the tests developed to align with them were meant to evaluate whether those expectations were bearing out in classrooms across the country.
At the Brooklyn New School, students being judged against their own progress rather than an external norm and on a performance-based assessment rather than a standardized test makes it impossible to evaluate them against their peers in other schools. As the opt-out movement continues, districts and states will have to grapple with the consequences.