Maryland planning new state standardized tests to replace PARCC

Maryland officials are dropping the state’s standardized test — known by parents, teachers and students as simply PARCC — in favor of something shorter and they hope more popular.

Maryland is one of just a handful of states still giving the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests, once used in dozens of states, but criticized as too time-consuming and too disruptive to the school schedule. It’s also difficult — less than half of Maryland students can pass it.

The state is seeking bids from contractors to design a new assessment that requires less time to take and grade, but it will not be ready for use until the 2019-2020 school year. So the state will spend another $11 million to continue testing with PARCC this spring.

The impetus for change came from Maryland State Superintendent Karen Salmon and Gov. Larry Hogan, who said he got many complaints.

“Nearly everyone in Maryland — parents, teachers, students and the governor want these tests to end,” Hogan said at a Board of Public Works meeting last month...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/k-12/bs-md-parcc-replacement-test-20180905-story.html

Grasmick Admits Bias in Pearson Contract

Citing an "abundance of caution", State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick recused herself from consideration of the Request for Stay filed on June 14, 2010. 


State Superintendent Grasmick states that:

...Because in one conversation on June 17, 2010, I discussed the substance of the Partnership Agreement with Pearson, albeit without any knowledge that this Request for Stay had been filed, I believe in an abundance of caution that I must recuse myself from making a decision on the Request for Stay...

Therefore, the Request for Stay that was to be reviewed by the State Superintendent was passed on to Deputy Superintendent John Smeallie who denied the request. 


The Request for Stay will now be reviewed by the State Board of Education on an expedited basis.


6/30/2010 UPDATE: The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) public relations office confirms that State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick's recusal was based on a phone call that she made to Pearson Education, Inc. on June 17, 2010 to inquire about any potential problems with the MCPS contract with Pearson Education, Inc., as MSDE also has a contract for testing with Pearson Education, Inc.


Grasmick6282010

State determines MCPS "Needs Intervention" re: performance under IDEA

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Maryland State Department of Education is required to make a determination annually on the performance of each local school system and assign the school system to one of four categories: Meets Requirements, Needs Assistance, Needs Intervention, and Needs Substantial Intervention.

Assistant State Superintendent Carol Ann Heath notified MCPS Superintendent Jerry
Weast by letter dated May 18, 2010 that Montgomery County Public Schools has
been determined to be Needs Intervention, Year Three, based on federal fiscal
year 2008 data, as well as information obtained through monitoring and complaint
investigations.


The determination is that MCPS is in the category of "Needs Intervention, Year Three" regarding its performance under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is based on targets for 20 indicators such as graduation rate, dropout rate, participation and performance on assessments, meeting evaluation timelines, and ensuring that complaints and hearings are resolved within required timelines. 


According to this report, one of the major ways MCPS is failing is that only 67.23% of students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs) are graduating with regular diplomas, and Maryland's expectations are that 85.5% of students with IEPs will graduate with a regular diploma. 


The full text of the letter is at the link below:  
MSDEMay182010

2 from Mont. Co. appointed to State Board of Ed by Governor

Former Montgomery superintendent named to Board of Regents

Two from Montgomery appointed to state school board by Gov. O'Malley

By Douglas Tallman | Staff Writer

- Luisa Montero-Diaz of Montgomery County to the Maryland State Board of Education. She is managing director of the Maryland Multicultural Youth Centers.

- Sayed M. Naved of Montgomery County to the state board of education. Naved is president of Banyan Technology Solutions, a small business that provides information technology services to federal clients.

How to Deal with Snow - Lessons from Baltimore Educational Elite

This blog previously reported that Nancy Grasmick, State Superintendent of Schools, plans to waive the 180 day requirement for the K-12 educational programs under her supervision. According to the Gazette, Dr. Grasmick says we need to be "sensitive to the weather." Really? Isn't that why snow days are built into school calendars?

What about concern for the education of the students? What about taxpayers who have paid to support their schools? Why is weather a big surprise?

Those of us who have been in MoCo know that our own Dr. Weast frequently cites Harvard as an example of educational excellence.

So - how does a university show that it is "sensitive to the weather?"

Here is an e-mail sent out to students at Johns Hopkins University. They too have been hit by record snows - and are still digging out much the same as we are in the DC suburbs.

Dear Homewood Students, Faculty and Staff:

Though we've now lost an entire week of classes to the historic back-to-back Blizzards of 2010, the university expects to resume its normal schedule on Monday. To ensure that our students have as complete and rich an academic experience as intended, we now are faced with the question of how to get the semester back on track and make up the lost time. We have consulted with faculty members in the Krieger and Whiting schools, with student leaders and with the various offices that would be affected by a change in the academic calendar. We have now come up with a plan.

We looked at canceling spring break. We looked at scheduling makeup classes in the evenings and on weekends. Both options would be, we feel, far too disruptive.

We have decided instead to extend the semester, compressing some activities so that we can add just a few days to the academic year and can continue with plans to hold Commencement on the long-scheduled date of May 27.

The original schedule for the Krieger and Whiting schools looked like this:

Monday, April 26-Friday, April 30: Last week of classes
Monday, May 3- Wednesday, May 5: Reading period
Thursday, May 6-Thursday, May 13: Examinations (Sunday, May 9, unscheduled =
for use as a "conflict resolution" day)
Thursday, May 27: Commencement

This revised schedule will recapture the lost week of classes:

Monday, May 3-Friday, May 7: Last week of classes
Saturday, May 8-Sunday, May 9: Reading period
Monday, May 10-Sunday, May 16: Examinations (no unscheduled day)
Thursday, May 27: Commencement

By compressing the reading and exam periods, we will delay the end of exams by only three days.

These changes will cause some inconvenience; they may require you to change travel or other arrangements that you thought just a week ago were locked in. But we believe our plan will cause the least possible disruption. Among a number of unappealing alternatives, this, we believe, is by far the most palatable for the most people.

Please note that the Registrar's Office will release a revised detailed examination schedule in the near future. Our thanks, in advance, go to all of you for making this amended academic calendar work in the best interest of our students.

It has been a trying week! Our deepest thanks to everyone who has worked so hard under extraordinary conditions to keep things going and to everyone working now to bring us back toward normal, a state that seemed unimaginable at the height of Wednesday's blizzard.

We particularly want to acknowledge the amazing work of the university's
grounds and custodial crews, everyone in Residential Life, Housing and Dining, and Campus Security, all of whom have made herculean efforts to keep our students safe, secure and comfortable. Thanks also to the Eisenhower Library staff; they went the extra mile to keep the library open when they could and provided services online when there was no choice but to close.

Let us suggest that when you see any of these hard-working Johns Hopkins employees over the next few days, you add your own personal word of thanks to them. They deserve it!

Sincerely,

Adam F. Falk
James B. Knapp Dean
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Nicholas P. Jones
Benjamin T. Rome Dean
Whiting School of Engineering

Read the email carefully. It's not just sensitivity to weather. JHU administrators are interested in delivering a "complete and rich" educational experience, even if the alternatives may be an inconvenience to some.

Funny, we have our own yardstick of educational excellence right in our own backyard. It's just up Charles Street from Dr. Gramick's office.  Aren't our youngest children also entitled to a complete and rich academic experience?   Let's not forget that a significant portion of MCPS kids are on free and reduced meals - and don't get fed every day school isn't open.   Or is the MSDE motto that "Achievement Matters Most" only limited to a pretty image on their webpage?

Gazette: State school board to withhold $23.4 million from Montgomery

State legislators have proposed a bill to exempt county from payment

Johns Hopkins Panel on NCLB Legislation

JHU School of Education hosts panel on No Child Left Behind

The Johns Hopkins University School of Education will host a panel discussion titled “What’s Next After No Child Left Behind” in anticipation of next year’s reauthorization of the legislation. The program, which is the culminating event in the school’s 100th anniversary celebration, will be held on Monday, Dec. 7, at 6:30 p.m. in Shriver Hall Auditorium.

The event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are encouraged and can be submitted online at http://www.education.jhu.edu/shaping-future.

Panel members include Martha Kanter, undersecretary of education, United States Department of Education; Nancy Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools; Andres Alonso, CEO, Baltimore City Schools; Joe Hairston, Baltimore County school superintendent; Robert Slavin, director of JHU’s Center for Research and Reform in Education; James McPartland, director of the Center for Social Organization of Schools, and Mariale Hardiman, former Baltimore City principal and chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the School of Education. A question and answer sessions will follow the presentations.

This program is the first in a series titled Shaping the Future, a series of discussions addressing the most challenging issues in education. For information, call 410-516-5588.

Full text of Atty General Opinion on Maintenance of Effort

Thanks to the Maryland Attorney General's office for providing immediate access to the full text of the Opinion regarding the Maintenance of Effort Requirement.

94oag177

WTOP's Kate Ryan reports here.

Just released! Audit of State Department of Education

The Maryland General Assembly's Office of Legislative Audits (OLA) has just released their Performance Audit Report for the Maryland State Department of Education.  Read the full audit here for details of the findings and recommendations.

Earlier this year, the OLA released their audit of MCPS.

Here is the summary of recommendations from the Maryland State Department of Education audit: 

Recommendations

The following detailed recommendations are among those we made to MSDE to
help strengthen the quality control processes and improve reporting for the
measures we audited.

• Establish procedures to ensure that all relevant data are included in the
measure calculation and that the data, including data obtained from third
parties, are reasonably accurate.
• Establish written definitions for all measures.
• Ensure that the reported performance measure represents the actual results
of the related measure calculation.

Doubts emerge as statewide tests keep just 11 from diploma -- baltimoresun.com

Doubts emerge as statewide tests keep just 11 from diploma -- baltimoresun.com

...Bebe Verdery, education director for the Maryland ACLU, said board members should not worry that the standards are too low until more students can pass.

"School systems generally did a good job of supporting students to meet the high school requirement through alternate routes so there were not huge numbers of students who didn't graduate," Verdery said. "The fact remains however, that only two-thirds of the seniors were able to pass all four tests and that points toward the need to improve instruction.

"The number who did not meet the requirement does not include those who may have dropped out because they became discouraged and believed they would never pass. In the Class of 2009, 1,700 dropped out last year and 2,200 failed to graduate because they hadn't passed classes and the tests. About 10,000 students in the class had dropped out over the course of four years, said Leslie Wilson, who is in charge of testing for the state...

Posted using ShareThis

Whose Scores Are They Anyway?

Why Is MCPS Holding MSA Home Reports Until After the Start of the New School Year?

The scores are in and MCPS knows exactly how your child did on the MSAs (Maryland Statewide Assessment) last spring. As a matter of fact, they have most likely been spending most of the summer using MSA data as a means of placing your student into his or her classes this fall. If that is the case, then how come you are receiving the home report this week? Why is MCPS MSA data for individual students being withheld from you as parents and not being sent out until the middle of September?

The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) Web site states that the testing vendor sends the scores for individual students to the local school systems and then the local school systems distribute individual scores to parents. MCPS distributes individual scores, or home reports as they are called, in September, after the new school year has already begun and your child’s classes and groupings have already been determined based on scores you have not seen. In some cases, you may even have received one of your child’s scores days before another child’s scores, simply because they go to different schools. So what exactly is the MCPS MSA Schedule for distribution to parents?

What about other Maryland counties? At least five other Maryland counties – Howard, Frederick, Anne Arundel, Prince Georges, and Baltimore, all provided their home reports to parents over the summer. Parents in these counties got to see their children’s scores before they went back to school; they knew why their children were placed in that advanced math or English class or were able to make the case if they weren’t. If this information is available in the summer, why is MCPS holding on to these reports and not providing them to its parents? Why aren’t they providing you with your own child’s test scores as soon as the scores are available? Where is the transparency MCPS likes to talk so much about? These results should be provided not only for the sake of the parents, but for the children who felt the pressure to perform on this test through those constant reminders of “get a good night’s sleep”, “eat a good breakfast”, and “don’t miss school”. Don’t the children deserve to see the results of their hard work?

With all of the stringent requirements and guidelines in place for MSA, why hasn’t MSDE instituted deadlines for the counties to return the home reports to parents, so that all Maryland parents can be informed of their child’s progress in a timely manner and be better advocates for their children’s education? Why is MCPS allowed to hold individual MSA data indefinitely? Nancy Grasmick, are you listening?

The Parents' Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland thanks this MCPS parent for submitting these comments to this blog. The author, while known to us, wishes to remain anonymous.

MD State Dept of Ed - Unusual Audit!

The Washington Examiner's Leah Fabel reports on Maryland State Auditor Bruce Myers' just released audit detailing financial concerns at the Maryland State Department of Education.

Once again, Mr. Myers documents when his office finds financial improprieties at a State agency; but will any government officials take action to correct these issues, or are State Audits just wasted paper?


Schools audit targets bureaucrat salaries, day care inspections Washington Examiner

Bureaucrats at the Maryland State Department of Education earned hefty salaries in apparent violation of state law, while day care centers operated without proper inspections, according to a state audit released this week.

Nearly 70 "loaned educators" -- county school officials contracted by the state for various projects -- were paid a total of almost $9 million in fiscal 2009, averaging about $130,000 annually and often "significantly higher than state employees serving in similar positions," the report said. Their forces have ballooned since 1990, when 21 loaned officials earned less than $1 million...

...Grasmick defended the role -- and the high salaries -- of loaned educators by saying they contribute to "Maryland's position as the No. 1 public school system in the nation."...

The unusually contentious report will go before the General Assembly's joint audit committee Tuesday.

Shared via AddThis