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Dear Lansing School District Community,
Week two is in the books. Amazing! We are continuing to meet all the new families and new staff. I was able to visit more schools and classrooms. More students came to school this week for the first time. In some ways, week two feels like the first real week. No half days, no one pretending they didn't know school started before Labor Day, no last summer vacation plans. Now it gets real. And like it or not, it means testing. I appreciate that there is a multiplicity of thought around standardized testing. But it is also part of the legal fabric of modern American education. So, if we are going to have to take tests, we should make them count. We should focus on two important facets: 1) doing well on them and 2) using the results to inform instruction.
There are two basic kinds of tests, formative and summative. An example of a summative exam would be the end of the year final exam; it sums up all the work/knowledge/understanding a student is supposed to know for the year. These tests are used for a final grade. There are good reasons to have summative exams; we want to know if a child learned what was taught. But in truth, summative exams are not that helpful. Once a student takes the exam, they move on. We don't learn from those exams, we can't react to those exams, we can't change our teaching to better suit the needs of the children. You take your final, you take your M-STEP, you take your AP exam, and you go to the next grade, never looking at those tests again.
Formative assessments, on the other hand, are where the magic can happen. This week we started NWEA testing. Many parents and students might say: "Wait, testing now? Why? We just got to school, shouldn't they be focused on learning their classmates' names and where the bathrooms are?" Yes, they should. But we also want an accurate assessment of where the students are currently in their understanding. Think of this test like an initial evaluation at the gym. But instead of measuring how many sit-ups you can do, we are looking at the students' reading level or math ability. By getting an accurate measure of where each and every student is as early in the year as possible, their teachers can now adjust the lessons and assignments to meet the students where they are and move them forward. If we don't know where the students' level of comprehension lays, teachers can only treat the class as a whole, rather than give individualized, differentiated work. Additionally, by getting an accurate reading of the current levels, we can look at growth during the entire year. We as a district need to hold ourselves accountable to growth, not just proficiency. We owe it to all 10,000+ students that when they enter our schools they continuously grow and learn. We can only know that if we take a formative assessment at the beginning of the year, and the middle of the year, and then that the summative assessment at the end of the year.
To use the gym analogy again: If you got to the gym already able to do 25 sit-ups, we want to make sure you can do 50 by the end of the year. If you got to the gym only able to do 2 sit-ups, then we will be thrilled if you make it to 24 by the end of the year. Even though the first student is now doing 50 and the second is doing 24, the second student is now doing 12 times as many sit-ups than at the start. That is wonderful growth that needs to celebrated. But without the formative assessment at the beginning, we wouldn't know how much improvement that second child had gained. And sadly, if the first student started at 25 and only got to 26 by the middle of the year, we need to know that too so we can figure out what we as a school district need to do better to get that student to grow more the second half of the year.
I appreciate that we all want our students to spend as much of their hours and days engaged in learning, but in order to know their strengths and challenges, in order to know what to teach and where to focus, we need, as early as possible to run these diagnostics for our students. I hope this makes sense. As always, I am available to discuss this or anything else.
We continue to receive positive emails about these newsletters. Please continue to contact us with your thoughts. We would love to hear your feedback, especially around topics you would like us to cover.
Thank you so much for all of your incredible support of our district. Together, we will do great things for the children of Lansing.
Benjamin Shuldiner, Superintendent
Lansing School District
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