GUILDERLAND — As assessments evolve at Guilderland, students and parents will see two important changes this school year.

Students will be taking fewer tests than they have in recent years. The goal, according to the new president of the teachers’ union, is to meet state mandates for teacher evaluation without “testing students to death.”

At the same time, the district is part of a consortium that receeived a nearly $400,000 state grant that will use assessments “as more of a coaching model,” the superintendent said.

The new Common Core standards were ushered in statewide at the same time that teachers were required for the first time to be judged, in part, by the performance of their students. The annual professional performance review, known as APPR, led Guilderland and many schools across the state to give tests at the beginning of the year to form a baseline against which to judge both student performance and teacher progress at the end of the year.

This caused much frustration for students, being purposely tested on material they didn’t yet know, and for teachers, too, who felt their students’ trust was undermined from the outset.

Two years ago, with little time to prepare, Guilderland used NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) tests, and then last year administered more district-developed tests instead. Those pre-assessment and post-assessment tests were given to students in every elementary grade on top of the state tests.

Now, the Guilderland Teachers’ Association has agreed to forego those tests entirely and use just the state-required tests.

“The teachers couldn’t administer the tests and couldn’t score the tests; they were banned by the state. Those tests were not informative,” said Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Demian Singleton. “The teachers decided it was a disruptive process and not worth it.”

Using just the state tests — an option New York has allowed since the beginning and which was initially favored by the district, Singleton said — will generate building-wide scores for the APPR. “The growth from one year to the next will apply equally to all the teachers in a school,” he said.

Singleton went on, “Now the building is looking through a common lens. They are rowing the boat in the same direction, not worrying about the score of each individual teacher.

“That was the district’s first proposal. I understand the fear,” said Singleton of the teachers’ initial reluctance to be judged that way. “You’re dependent on the quality and scoring of a state test.”

He concluded, “Teachers are now saying: We’re giving it anyway; it’s not the threat we thought. They’re willing to roll the dice to reduce the pressure on students.”

Erin McNamara, who in July became president of the Guilderland Teachers’ Association — the district’s largest union with nearly 500 members — said this week, “The mandates are controlling how teachers spend their time in the classroom. We were looking for a unified approach that helped everyone,” she said referring to teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, “without testing the students to death.”

GTA members, who include guidance counselors, school social workers, librarians, registered school nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech therapists as well as teachers, were polled in each building, McNamara said and the “overwhelming majority” favored the new approach; no formal vote was taken.

The nine school board members unanimously approved the memorandum of agreement last Tuesday. The agreement is in place for one year.

Superintendent Marie Wiles told the school board that the agreement was “a huge breakthrough” that would “reap all kinds of instructional time.”

She also said last Tuesday night, “The ink is still wet” and the plan still had to be submitted to the State Education Department. Wiles concluded, “We locked in a good plan for kids and teachers.”

“We revisit it each year as it has to be submitted to the State Education Department each year,” said McNamara.

“Of course students need to be tested to show growth,” said McNamara, a high school English teacher. “But it was interfering and taking away days and days of instruction,” she said of the pre- and post-assessments, noting that Regents exams still have to be counted for the growth score.

McNamara went on, “We balanced that. We are all in it together, in educating the whole student.”

Some teachers, she noted, are making a sacrifice with the new system. For example, a teacher who was rated “highly effective” could fall into the lower state-set category of “effective” if that is what the combined rating, based on state test scores, for the building turned out to be.

Still, she said, just as there is an overall benefit for students having to take fewer tests, there is also a benefit for teachers. “Some of us were coming up with tests for the sake of coming up with tests,” said McNamara “It impacted our instructional time.”

She also said the “management part” was difficult, explaining, “We can’t score our own students” so exchanges had to be set up.

“Sometimes we’re at the mercy of the state,” McNamara said on the late release of scores but, she concluded, under the new agreement, “We can focus more on classroom instruction time.”

Summarizing the situation, Singleton said that, of all the reform goals from the state, “the most damaging area has been APPR.”

Teachers’ unions agreed to have student test scores count as part of their evaluation in order for the state to obtain federal Race To The Top funds; New York had missed out on the first try. Relatively wealthy districts like Guilderland received very little of the federal funds.

“Sadly,” said Singleton, “I’ve seen a loss of respect for assessment.”

He lauded the GTA for its acceptance that “state tests will always be here,” summarizing the teachers’ view as, “Why pile on more?”

$400K Core grant

Singleton and Wiles both drew a sharp line between kinds of assessments. On the one hand, there are standardized tests, like those administered by the state, that evaluate teachers, schools, and districts. But those tests, with results that come months later, aren’t particularly useful for teaching individual students, they said.

On the other hand, in-class assessments can be a valuable guide to teachers on a daily basis as they tailor their lessons to fit specific student needs.

To this end, Guilderland is part of a consortium of 12 schools, led by the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Educational Services, that has been given a $399,946 Teaching is the Core grant from the State Education Department, one of 31 awarded across New York.

The grant will fund activities from this Sept. 1 to next June 30.

“It will provided additional resources for all of us to improve better classroom assessment,” said Wiles.

Guilderland, like the other 11 schools — Cohoes, Mohonasen, Niskayuna, North Colonie, Schalmont, Schoharie, Scotia-Glenville, Shenendehowa, South Colonie, Voorheesville, and Watervliet — will form an assessment review team of teachers and administrators to do the work. One of the goals of the grant is to engage parents in the use of assessments.

Wiles surmised, “Some elements will run through the work of all the districts and some will meet specific needs in individual districts.”

Guilderland, Wiles said, may be ahead of the curve as it has worked with Jennifer Borgioli for the last three years to design meaningful classroom assessments. Borgioli, a former special-education teacher, is a senior consultant at Learner-Centered Initiatives. Borgioli says in her LCI biography that she is intrigued by this question: “What are the implications of reducing learning to a number?”

“Assessment is a critical part of the teaching process,” said Singleton. “State test are a once-a-year event and are not testing for student learning but of their learning. They are not intended to inform next steps of instruction but are more to look back to see if a program as a whole is teaching kids.”

While state tests are used primarily for accountability, Singleton said, the results can be useful in adjusting curriculum. The kinds of assessments developed through the Core grant will not be “summative,” Singleton said, meaning they are not high-stakes where students’ progress are measured against benchmarks.

Asked for an instance of how a classroom assessment might be used, Wiles gave the example of improving writing. “You would create writing tasks and develop rubrics to judge how good the writing is,” said Wiles.

The teacher could immediately hold in her hand the results of that assessment and shape her very next lesson to group students according to their needs, teaching one group, for example, about how to construct a strong thesis sentence, while teaching another group about the need for supportive detail.

“It’s using data to know what to do next with instruction” said Wiles, contrasting that with state testing. “State testing isn’t individual student assessment. It’s program- and school-wide. In the absence of actual questions,” she said of the state’s reluctance to divulge them all, “you can’t use the data to do much to define what to do next in the classroom.”

She concluded, “The state tests’ purpose is about overall school performance and making progress towards standards. We get the results so long after, they’re not immediate enough to inform instruction.”

The assessments to be developed with the Teaching is the Core grant, she said, would serve as “more of a coaching model.”