There is a deep need to have a well-articulated and clearly understood assessment system to measure students’ academic growth and achievement. A strong assessment system provides professional educators with “feed forward” information that is necessary to support efforts for continuous academic growth. In order to provide sound, academic interventions, we must have data that reflects where students are in mastery of the priority standards and the assessment anchors. If we are to make efforts to revise curricular needs or structures, we must have assessment data that provides evidence of where we are both succeeding and falling short. We also need assessment data to help us identify the professional development needs of our faculty, staff and administration so that, as a district, we can properly plan and invest in learning opportunities for teachers and administrators to be able to more successfully support our students.

Aside from the frequent classroom assessments that teachers utilize, a strong system for assessment begins with the use of common grade level benchmark assessments that are developed to align with the priority standards and state assessment anchors, which allows for the monitoring of student growth and achievement. These criterion-referenced, common assessments will provide teachers with a clearer understanding of what the specific grade-level expectations are and how students can become more successful through scaffolding instruction, reteaching or tiered interventions. Common assessments also allow for consistent scoring and evaluation aligned to grade-level benchmarks.

In addition to criterion-referenced assessments, in order to identify exactly what support students need, we believe that we need to utilize a norm-referenced diagnostic assessment so that we are able to specifically drill down to individual student needs through interventions. Norm-referenced diagnostic assessments will allow us to measure growth efficiently so that we can adjust the learning plan of not only entire classrooms but also individual students.

Finally, there is a strong need to closely review state assessment results. The value of the analysis of these results lies not in the percentages of proficiency, but in measuring the effectiveness of our curriculum and its implementation by grade level and content area across the district.