Last week hundreds of suburban high school seniors refused to take the state’s standardized tests. After the most public assault on the system so far, it’s clear Colorado’s testing system is at a crossroads.
And now state officials are looking for direction. Joyce Zurowski, executive director of assessment at the Colorado Department of Education put it this way:
Colorado still has to have that conversation — what is that we want from our state system. I think that conversation should be occurring. … This new assessment system has been built off [previous conversations and] those assumptions, those priorities, those values, and it may very well be across time those have shifted. We need to know how those have shifted, and we can try to adjust within the confines of the law.
This weeks question: What do we want state standardized assessments to accomplish and how should we use the results?
For example: should the test results be used only for school and district accountability purposes? Or should we have a required graduation exam for all 12th graders? Or is do we just need to adopt the federal minimum?
Each Monday, we ask readers a question about a timely or timeless question about their experiences in education. Readers who want to share their opinions should leave a response in the comment section below, tweet us @ChalkbeatCO, send an email, or leave a comment on our Facebook wall. Every Friday we round up the responses.
See last’s week’s responses here.