Despite opposition from teachers, the county Board of Education (BOE) on Tuesday voted unanimously to move ahead with its plan to eliminate all countywide high school final exams starting next school year.
The decision, which followed the board’s vote in September to tentatively drop final exams, was touted as a way to give students more classroom instruction time and allow for more frequent and less time-consuming tests or projects that would more closely monitor students’ progress. The board also views the move as a potential part of the solution to the school system’s longstanding achievement gap between white and minority students.
“I subscribe to the Albert Einstein definition of insanity. It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” BOE President Patricia O’Neill said. “I believe with the structure of our final exam week, we are short-changing our students in terms of the amount of instruction.”
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) has two-hour final exam testing windows during final exam week in high schools. That will end starting in the 2016-2017 school year and MCPS officials said Tuesday they will roll out pilot marking period assessments in some classrooms this spring.
MCPS staff will then report back to the BOE in June to evaluate how those assessments went, with the idea of planning the new marking period assessments over the summer of 2016, said Erick Lang, the school system’s associate superintendent and the leader of the Office of Curriculum & Instructional Programs.
The assessments will take the form of a unit test or project and be given each of the four marking periods during regular class periods.
“We have a very serious achievement gap in front of us and we have to talk seriously about what we’re going to do differently,” said Scott Murphy, director of the school system’s Secondary Curriculum and Districtwide Programs. “I believe it compels us to get some instructional time back to implement the assessment strategy with our kids.”
What the testing schedule could look like for high school students next year, now that semester-ending final exams have been eliminated, via MCPS
With the unanimous vote, all final exams in middle school courses and all exams for high school courses for which there is already a corresponding state assessment, known as a PARCC test, will be eliminated this spring.
Last week, the state revealed that most MCPS students failed to earn a college-ready score on the first PARCC tests administered last spring, an expected result that nonetheless has produced more anxiety among parents and students over testing.
James Koutsos, president of the Montgomery County Association of Administrators and Principals, told the BOE that principals and students support ending final exams and that the “proposed quarterly assessments will also create greater alignment and more frequent feedback to students on their progress across all four marking periods.”
But teachers, backed by a survey showing most high school teachers opposed dropping final exams, told the BOE they were concerned that losing end-of-semester final exams could hurt students’ ability to take other standardized tests and hurt teachers’ ability to gauge whether a student built up a cumulative knowledge base over the semester.
“The board seems prepared to eliminate exams despite teachers’ opinions and, apparently, without public support,” said Richard Montgomery High School English teacher Leah Wilson, referring to public comments she characterized as mostly opposed to dropping exams. “What should be an open-ended, deep discussion about the very nature of assessment has been reduced to a superficial chat, where teachers are instead asked to weigh in only on how best to calculate a grade.”
Anticipating the opposition, MCPS staff created a matrix of 15 common concerns about dropping exams and responses to each one.
“Whether it be right or wrong, I think teachers feel they weren’t in the loop enough,” BOE member Michael Durso said. “I worry about morale issues. The principals and the teachers don’t seem to be on the same page on this one. If everyone’s not on the same page, we’re just going to be running around in circles.”
