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West facade of Alexandria, VA City Hall, from craigbutcher, Wikimedia, Creative Commons Zero
Over thirty years ago, I, Gene, wrote a piece with Eric Hanushek, one of the nation’s foremost educational scholars, on Bringing Educational Measurement Into the Age of Newton [ [link removed] ]. The point was somewhat simple: We need better information on how our students are progressing; the allusion to Newton refers to measuring marginal gains. In the piece below, largely taken from an article in the Alexandria Times [ [link removed] ], Mark Eaton and I make a similar argument for measuring both student and school-wide progress in Alexandria, VA. The responsibility for this necessary but difficult task falls ever more in the hands of local jurisdictions, given the limited success of top-down mandates and the current gutting of much of the U.S. Department of Education.
Educational support services represent Alexandria’s most significant effort to promote opportunity for all and, with federal and state funding included, the city’s largest budget expense.
We currently lack informative data on the quality of our public schools for all students and the number who lack access to essential resources.
Year after year, state and other academic assessments [ [link removed] ] indicate that many students in Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) fall below various achievement standards. The reflexive response has been that a disproportionately high percentage of ACPS students have English language or other learning deficits.
The criticism and response focus on the wrong data. To understand how well English-language learners (ELL) are performing, we need to measure their progress, not just their attainment levels. To assess primary grade performance in math, we must determine how quickly students advance to the next level, such as moving from single-digit to double-digit addition, rather than merely whether they can perform double-digit addition.
Some students grasp English well, while others begin with a limited understanding. Some students excel in subtraction and multiplication, but show little progress; others with minimal math backgrounds demonstrate significant improvement. Typical attainment measures are relatively uninformative about both individual students and groups of students.
National or state efforts to assess progress impose top-down mandates and are conducted too infrequently to provide parents and teachers with useful guidance on progress made. Recently published National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, for instance, offer little insight into the progress of individual students. At times, it and similar tests create undesirable incentives.
A former ACPS administrator was urged by supervisory personnel to focus resources on students who are just below the threshold of an upcoming achievement standard. In other words, the administrator was advised to ignore those who are far below or well above the standard.
ACPS rightly raises concerns about the education evaluation program of Gov. Glenn Youngkin if it simply labels schools rather than offers measures that teachers and parents can use promptly to respond to each student’s ongoing longitudinal progress.
None of this is easy, but it is necessary. A primary objective of ACPS should be to help every student reach their maximum potential. We propose investing more in a bottom-up measurement process that teachers and parents find useful, allowing for a more accurate understanding of each student’s progress, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
When ACPS begins measuring each student’s progress from their current level, the data can sometimes be aggregated. Measuring the longitudinal progress of our ELL and other students, such as those achieving more than a year’s gain in performance, will start telling us how effectively our public schools serve them. Until then, we won’t know.
Beyond K-12 education, we hope the city will continue to add and track essential services and supports that are vital for helping very young children succeed, as discussed in the Ready Communities section of the Virginia Department of Education’s definition of School Readiness and in the efforts of Alexandrians through Kids’ First Years [ [link removed] ]. This includes ongoing efforts to assess who is underserved and why.
As a community rich in talent, resources, and collaboration, we should remain at the forefront of early childhood investment. If we can’t succeed here, then who can? Measurement helps us know whether we are achieving our goals.
Mark Eaton, a former lawyer, served on the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006 and taught English at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School, from 2007 to 2021.
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