The Education Commonwealth Project (ECP) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell is guided by the belief that better school quality data can help identify and respond to inequities in students’ school experiences and that real-world assessments of student learning can enable a greater diversity of students to demonstrate their proficiency. Funded by the Massachusetts State Legislature, ECP offers public school districts across the state a new approach to evaluating school quality and student learning. The School Quality Measures data dashboard and Quality Performance Assessments have already been successfully piloted by the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), and with financial backing from Massachusetts State Legislature, they are now being made available on a free and open-source basis. +
+In place of standardized tests like the MCAS, Quality Performance Assessments emphasize teacher-generated, curriculum-embedded methods to evaluate students’ deeper mastery of content and skills. And seeking to challenge and expand the existing accountability system, the School Quality Measures framework reflects the full scope of what schools do, while also collecting a broader range of data for determining school progress.
+ + Read More here + + +The Education Commonwealth Project is an extension of the <%= link_to "Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA)", "https://www.mciea.org/" %>. Formed in 2016 with support from the Massachusetts State Legislature, MCIEA is a partnership of eight public school districts–Attleboro, Boston, Lowell, Milford, Revere, Somerville, Wareham, Winchester–and their local teacher unions. The eight MCIEA districts have worked together since 2016, with support from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Center for Collaborative Education, to create fairer and more accurate pictures of students and schools. The consortium is co-governed by the superintendents and teachers’ union presidents in recognition of the benefits to such partnerships.
+The mission of ECP is to provide districts with the opportunity to adopt the innovative assessment and accountability tools developed by MCIEA. We seek to increase knowledge among school community members about these alternative measurements, build school and district capacity for employing them, and further develop a system that might be adopted across the Commonwealth. In doing so, ECP strives to advance educational assessment that is more valid, more democratic, and more equitable than the current accountability system powered chiefly by a single set of standardized tests. Districts may choose to join MCIEA, or use one or both of the tools independently and tailored to their specific needs. +ECP will partner with any Massachusetts public school district, provided that administrators, educators, and community members are meaningfully engaged. Working with ECP can be as simple as having a conversation with our team about assessment. But we also offer the following full range of resources on a free and open-source basis: +
+The Education Commonwealth Project (ECP) works to support assessments of student learning and school + progress that are more valid, democratic, and holistic than traditional test-based school measurement. + ECP offers free and open-source resources for public schools and districts seeking to develop alternative + approaches to measurement and accountability.
+ <%# %> + <%# Call to action %> + <%# %> + <%# %> +The School Quality Measures project (SQM) moves beyond test scores to reimagine how we understand and measure + school quality. From implementing new data sources, like student and teacher surveys, to visualizing data in + new ways that go beyond ranking and rating, the SQM team is here to support Massachusetts districts as they work + to assemble a fuller and more accurate portrait of their schools.
+ <%# %> + <%# Call to action %> + <%# %> + <%# %> +The Quality Performance Assessment (QPA) project moves beyond testing a narrow range of knowledge in + one moment of time to rethink how we assess student learning. By providing examples of high quality + performance assessments, a toolkit of protocols, and guidance, the QPA team seeks to provide a model + for reimagining state assessment in Massachusetts and beyond.
+ <%# %> + <%# Call to action %> + <%# %> + <%# %> +We'd love to hear from you
+The Quality Performance Assessment (QPA) project moves beyond testing a narrow range of knowledge in one moment of time to rethink how we assess student learning. Through creating teacher-generated, standards-based, curriculum-embedded, and equity-minded performance assessments, a greater diversity of students are able to demonstrate what they know and a wider range of knowledge and skills can be assessed. By providing examples of high quality performance assessments, a toolkit of protocols, and guidance, the QPA team seeks to provide a model for reimagining state assessment in Massachusetts and beyond.
+ +Over the past twenty years, MCAS, the statewide assessment in Massachusetts, has done little to close persistent score disparities by race, income, language, and disability. Additionally, MCAS has had significant negative impacts by narrowing the curriculum and losing valuable learning time to low-quality test preparation, particularly in school districts with high percentages of students from historically marginalized groups. The use of standardized tests within rigid accountability systems has led to increased inequality in schools, as these measures are consistently correlated with socioeconomic factors and race..
+ +Assessments should test what is most important. Performance tasks provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in multiple ways. High-quality, authentic performance tasks are rich assessment experiences that engage students in meaningful writing, oral presentations, synthesis, analysis, reasoning, problem solving, collaborative teamwork. QPAs are better suited than traditional standardized tests for preparing students to tackle the kinds of tasks they will encounter in college, the workplace, and as citizens.
+ +Performance tasks are the culmination of curriculum units that enable students to demonstrate what they know and can do. They are an extension of learning as students apply their acquired knowledge and skills in a real-world setting.
+ +With the increasing diversity of students in our public schools, well designed performance assessments provide opportunities to showcase the knowledge and skills of historically marginalized groups and cultivate skills for all students such as critical consciousness and anti-racism.
+ +Performance tasks provide rich information to facilitate immediate feedback on what a student knows and can do. This data enables teachers to address learning gaps in more timely ways. A portfolio of student work derived from performance assessments within and across academic years provides an in-depth view of how student learning is progressing over time and how knowledge is building towards proficiency of content standards and skills.
+ ++ + Read More About MCIEA’s Free Performance Assessment Task Bank + + +
++ + Read More About Free QPA tools and protocols + + + +
+ + +The School Quality Measures project (SQM) moves beyond test scores to reimagine how we understand and measure school quality. By drawing on a broad set of measures that includes social-emotional indicators, school culture indicators, and opportunity-to-learn indicators, SQM offers communities tools and practices that better reflect the full range of what schools do. From implementing new data sources, like student and teacher surveys, to visualizing data in new ways that go beyond ranking and rating, the SQM team is here to support Massachusetts districts as they work to assemble a fuller and more accurate portrait of their schools.
+ +Traditional measurement and accountability systems, which rely heavily on standardized tests, have been plagued by a host of unintended consequences like teaching-to-the-test and the narrowing of educational aims. Moreover, such systems have been largely ineffective at advancing equity and supporting the work of school improvement.
+The SQM approach includes a wide range of indicators aligned with the domains of school quality that Americans value and that research supports. By assessing the many things that schools do, the SQM system seeks to honor and sustain the full mission of public schools.
+ +SQM includes 34 indicators of school quality, seeking to paint a more accurate and valid picture of school performance. By using multiple measures SQM moves beyond the narrow and overly simplistic notion of “good” and “bad” schools that drives inequity and dominates the contemporary education policy debate.
+ +Research shows that test scores are closely linked to demographics, such as student race and socio-economic status. To rely on test scores as the primary measures of school quality, then, is to reinforce existing inequities. SQM seeks to break the relationship between school quality measurement and educational inequity by offering a system of measurement that is not skewed by racial bias.
+ +SQM encourages inclusive, democratic deliberation and is rooted in the belief that educators and community members should be empowered to make meaningful decisions about their schools. Rather than rating and ranking schools like traditional accountability systems, SQM visualizes school quality data on a publicly accessible dashboard and ECP staff support school communities in sense-making of data.
+ ++ + Read more about SQM's Free-and-Open SQM Data Dashboard here + + +
++ + See our Measures Menu Here + + + +
+ + +Ashley Carey is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a former Lawrence High School art teacher. She joins ECP with practical and research experience related to school measurement and accountability. During her time at MCIEA, Ashley worked with teachers, school leaders, and district administrators, to help build their capacity for engaging with and understanding a broad range of data. As an affiliate of the Beyond Test Scores Project, she collaborates on research projects that examine the role of educational accountability, including its relationship to racial and socioeconomic inequality. Ashley also works as an adjunct instructor at Merrimack College, where she teaches in the department of Human Development & Community Engagement.
+Dan French co-leads performance assessment work within ECP. He was formerly executive director of Center for Collaborative Education, a nonprofit dedicated to assist public school districts to create equity-minded schools that provide quality education to every student. In this role, he co-founded the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, a model of assessing school quality and student learning that can serve as an alternative to the current biased MA education accountability system. Prior, Dan was director of curriculum & instruction at Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, before leaving in protest of the agency’s move toward a single, high stakes standardized graduation test. He started his education career as a teacher of students with special needs. Dan received his doctorate from UMass Amherst.
+Nelson Jovel has previously worked as a teacher for <%= link_to "Summerbridge", "https://www.breakthroughcollaborative.org/" %>; a summer school program for under-resourced students. He also worked at Woodside Priory School assisting students residing at the school through the boarding program. Nelson Jovel is the lead developer of the <%= link_to "School Quality Measures Dashboard", "https://mciea-dashboard.herokuapp.com/welcome" %> for MCIEA. He is also the developer on the project to customize the School Quality Measures Dashboard for the district of Lowell.
+Dr. Susan Lyons is the owner and Principal Consultant at <%= link_to "Lyons Assessment Consulting", "https://www.lyonsassessmentconsulting.com/" %>. Her firm is a leader in supporting innovation in educational assessment and school accountability, working closely with clients across the country to transform traditional assessment systems to better serve all students. Dr. Lyons began her career in the classroom as a seventh-grade math teacher in Quito, Ecuador. In addition to her consulting work, Dr. Lyons is a part-time faculty member at Boston College and is the Executive Director of a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing gender and racial equity in the field of educational measurement, <%= link_to "Women in Measurement", "https://womeninmeasurement.org/" %>.
+Peter Piazza is the Director of the School Quality Measures project at the Education Commonwealth Project. He formerly led school quality measure work at the Massachusetts’ Consortium for Innovative Educational Assessment, a coalition of public K-12 districts piloting a non-test-based form of school quality measurement. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights, and he writes about race and school integration at the School Diversity Notebook blog, an affiliate of the National Coalition on School Diversity. Peter is also an adjunct instructor in the Leadership in Schooling Ed.D. program at the University of Massachusetts - Lowell. He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College in 2015.
+Julie Spencer-Robinson is Director of Engagement at the Education Commonwealth Project. She recently earned her Ph.D. in Educational Policy, Research, and Administration from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Julie worked for 25 years as a public middle and high school teacher, and was also president of the Northampton Association of School Employees. She currently serves as an elected trustee of Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School, as a board member of the Collaborative for Educational Services, and on the Vocational Technical Education Advisory Council to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
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