Congratulations to Scott Smith, the new director of the Career, Standards, & Assessment Services team within KSDE’s Learning Services division!

The Common Core, the current and next-generation state assessments, the accountability and teacher evaluation systems – these and many other issues will present Scott with many interesting challenges and opportunities…

We sincerely wish the best of luck and the utmost wisdom to Scott and, in fact, to all of our friends at KSDE!

Please contact us if we might assist you in interpreting, summarizing, and using the reports, or even in countering or challenging the results, if such action seems warranted.

The conference’s planning committee consists of Stephen Court, Neal Kingston, and Jim Popham.

Everyone reading this announcement is invited to attend.

Additional information and registration materials are available at the conference website.

In case you missed these two Waiver-related news stories in Education Week:

Aug. 26: Federal Oversight Takes Aim at Waiver Compliance

Aug. 30: Arne Duncan Attaches More Strings to NCLB Waiver Renewals 

Yet, mapping state assessment results onto NAEP reveals that the grade 4 proficiency cut score in reading is the 9^th lowest in the nation, ranking well below NAEP’s Basic category.

From another perspective, the most highly performing district in Kansas had only 64% of its grade 4 students classified by the state assessments as Exemplary in reading.  Meanwhile, only 11 additional Kansas districts had even 50% of their students classified as Exemplary, and more than half of all Kansas districts had less than a 1/3 of their students classified as Exemplary.

Clearly, every district in Kansas has room to improve, and improvement clearly requires expertise in research, assessment, accountability, and evaluation – not just to collect and crunch the numbers but also to analyze, interpret, summarize, report, and apply the results.

We recently visited a representative random sample of fifty district websites in Kansas.  What we found disturbed us.

• Most district mission statements include buzz terms such as data-driven, research-based, and high-quality.  Yet, most Kansas districts do not have a department of research, assessment, and evaluation.

In fact, very few districts have even one person assigned full-time to the areas of research, assessment and accountability, and evaluation.

• Many of the websites that we visited provide no description whatsoever of their assessment programs or summaries of student achievement.

Some other websites merely provide a link to their Report Card on the KSDE website, adding no commentary at all and providing no results of any other testing.

In short, few district websites in Kansas provide any evidence that classroom, school-level, and district-wide decisions are based on anything more than hunches, hearsay, and hype.

Interestingly, districts will readily retain lawyers to handle their legal affairs and architects to design their schools and other facilities.

Yet, they clearly refrain from hiring or retaining genuine, professional-caliber experts to handle work related to research, assessment, accountability, and evaluation.

It kind of makes you wonder.

Several details about our capacity lie camouflaged between the lines of text on the Services page.

For example, Stephen possesses decades of experience writing and editing passage-item sets for reading tests and stimuli-item sets for other assessments in math, science, social studies, etc. – including recent work involving the Common Core Standards, as well as online delivery modules.

As another example, Dan’s team at KCK won one of the earliest district-level waivers for NCLB granted by the Feds, and he managed the accountability data for the first year of implementation.  Dan also provided internal data management, analyses, and survey support for the district’s First Things First reform effort throughout the previous decade.

What say you?