well as community members in my home state of washington about the way the current system doesn't work when it comes to testing. we can and should encourage states and districts to reduce redundant and low quality tests. because we have a national interest in making sure all students get an excellent education we do need federal oversight to make sure our system is working for every child. that means offering the resources for improving professional development and for expanding access to high quality learning opportunities to help our struggling schools so we don't consign some kids to subpar education. while we carefully consider changes to assessments and accountability to give states and districts the flexibility they need we can't forget our obl obligations to the kids who far too often fall through the cracks. i have laid out my priorities for fixing this broken law. i know chairman alexander has put his priorities out in the

discussion draft. i hope we can begin conversations about a truly bipartisan approach to help fix this broken law. i know the members on my side are anxious to begin work and to continue the long tradition of this committee tackling tough problems in a bipartisan fashion. fixing no child left behind should not be a partisan issue. it should be one that we do work hand in hand not as democrats and republicans but as americans. this is an issue that is not about politics. it is about what is best for our kids. in our country we believe that every student should have access to a quality public education regardless of where they live or how they learn or how much money their parents make. that vision is a big part of what we mean when we talk about america, what makes our country great. other countries in the world are investing in education. they are working every day to get it right for their students. china, india and others think they can beat us in the classroom. we know better. we know we can win this and we

know that we have to. for students back in my home state of washington for our economic future and for our shared vision of an american dream. so we can't afford to turn back the clock on the promise of quality education for all. we can't not be the generation that drops the ball on that noble goal and i'm going to continue to fight to bring quality education to all of our students. thank you and i look forward to the panel discussion. >> thank you senator murray. as we will always try to do we will try to have a bipartisan agreement on witnesses. we were able to do that today. we ask senator warren and senator bennett to introduce two of the witnesses and i will introduce the other four. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i am pleased to introduce dr. marty west, an associate professor of education at the harvard graduate school of education and deputy director of the harvard kennedy school's program on education policy and governance.

dr. west studies education policy and reform and impact on student learning and development. he has authored many articles on the subject including many pieces on no child left behind. last year dr. west worked for this committee as senior education policy adviser. to chairman alexander. i know there are areas where we agree and areas where we disagree but i am always very happy to welcome witnesses from massachusetts to testify before this committee. thank you, dr. west, for being here today. >> senator bennett. >> thank you, mr. chairman and i want to thank you and ranking member for holding this hearing. i often say that if we had a rally to keep no child left behind the same on the capitol steps not a single person in the country would come to that. we are eight years overdue. we are long overdue. i am honored to introduce my friend tom boss boasberg, the

superintendent of the denver public schools. tom joined as chief operations officer in 2007 while i was superintendent and then was unanimously appointed superintendent in 2009 by a grateful school board who no longer had to deal with me. before joining dps tom served as group vice president where he was responsible for the company's mergers acquisitions and strategic partnerships. prior to level three he was legal adviser to reed hunt at the fcc. he helped establish the e-rate program. tom began his career as a junior high school english teacher. in hong kong public schools. he claims to speak fluent mandarin and cantonese. since i can't speak either, i have no idea whether that's true or not. today tom oversees the largest school district in colorado with 185 schools and enrollment of more than 90,000 students and 13,000 employees. when i left denver public schools in 2009 i said if i did a decent job, tom will do a better job. no doubt that has been the case. denver public schools is ranked

at the top of the state's largest districts in student growth. in 2005 denver was dead last. just last year denver public school students eligible for free and reduced lunch had stronger academic growth than non-free and reduced lunch students statewide in math and writing. and students showed more growth in state counterparts in math by eight points. on top of that the english language learners have outperformed the states. tom happens to be responsible for educating my three daughters. as we begin to talk about reauthorizing we need to hear the voices of those fighting every day to improve our kids' education. tom boasberg in my view is at the top of the list. thank you for being here today and we are all looking forward to hearing your testimony. mr. chairman, thank you for including me. >> thank you, senator bennett. i think that boils down to he cleaned up after you left. >> you can't even know half of the truth.

>> we are delighted to have you. let me just mention the other witnesses and we turn to them. mr. paul leather is here deputy commissioner of education in new hampshire. mr. wade henderson is here, who testified before this committee before, chief executive officer of the leadership conference on civil and human rights and leadership conference education fund. miss jia lee, fourth and fifth grade special education teacher of the earth school new york city. and mr. stephen lazar, social studies and english teacher harvard collegiate high school in new york city. i have asked -- we have your testimony and we have read them, at least i have. we ask you to summarize your testimony in five minutes because we have a lot of interested senators who would like to ask you questions.

if you don't mind there is a clock that will show you five minutes. why don't we start with you dr. west and then go to questions from the senators. >> thank you. chairman alexander, senator murray, members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. i would like to begin by congratulating the committee by putting this at the top of the legislative agenda for 114th congress. nothing is more important to our nation's future than insuring we provide all children with opportunity to reach full academic potential. congress can't do that on its own but it can help by addressing the shortcomings of the most recent reauthorization, no child left behind, and restoring the predictability with respect to federal education policy that state and local officials need to carry out their work. as you move forward with this important work, however, i urge you not to lose sight of the positive aspects of no child left behind, the law's requirement that students be tested annually in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school has provided parents teachers

and others with detailed information about students' performance in these subjects. the extent to which they have mastered skills that are prerequisite for other educational goals. this has called attention to achievement gaps across entire states and within specific schools. it is ushered in a new era in education research and made it possible to develop new indicators of schools' performance based on contribution to student learning. research confirms that by requiring states that had not implemented school systems to do so, no child left behind worked to generate modest improvements in student learning, concentrated in math and among the lowest performing students. i say worked in the past sense as the days when no child left behind worked are behind us. as the deadline for all students performing at grade level approached far too many schools were identified as under

performing and the system lost its most critical asset, its credibility. recent concerns have been raised about the amount of time students spend taking standardized tests. we lack systematic data on the amount of time students nationwide spend taking those tests and nor do we know how much would be optimal. a handful of recent audits suggest students spend 1% to 3% of the year taking standardized tests, a figure that sounds appropriate. given the value of the information they provide. we also know some schools test far more than this and too many schools spend too much time. the concerns voiced by parents and educators in these schools are legitimate. eliminating testing requirements is not necessary to address the concerns. it would only make them harder to do so. it is not necessary because federally mandated tests account for less than half of test taking time.

just 32% in a recent ohio study. the rest of the time is devoted to state and district mandated tests and new tests implemented to assess the teacher evaluation system. it would make matters more difficult because the most important flaw of the no child left behind accountability system is the reliance at the level as the measure of school performance. achievement levels are a poor indicator of school quality as they are influenced by factors outside of a school's control. this approach, all that is possible under a testing regime judges schools based on the students they serve, not on how well they serve them. performance measures based over time which are possible with annual testing provide a fair more accurate picture of school's contribution to student learning. why did congress design such a system in 2002? one key reason is many states did not yet test students annually and those who did were

not able to track performance of individual students over time. that situation has changed thanks to no child left behind and related federal investments. it would be ironic and in my view unfortunate if congress were to re-create the conditions that led to the adoption of an ill-designed accountability system in the first place. eliminating annual testing would have other negative consequences. it would all but eliminate school level information about the learning of student subgroups and limit the information available to parents making choices about the school the child attends. whether through open enrollment or charter school programs. third, it would prevent policymakers and researchers from evaluating effectiveness of new education programs when appropriate research design depends on knowledge of recent achievement. my main recommendation is to maintain the testing requirements while restoring to states decisions about design of accountability systems including how schools are identified as under performing.

and what should be done to improve their performance. the federal government has a critical role to play in insuring that parents and citizens have good information about school's performance. at the same time the federal government lacks capacity to design a system that is appropriate to the needs of each state and has a poor record of attempting to dictate the required element by focusing on transparency of information about school performance and resources congress can build on successes of no child left behind while learning from its failures. thank you and i look forward to your questions. >> thank you, dr. west, for excellent testimony, for coming very close to five minutes. mr. leather. >> chairman alexander, senator murray and members of the committee thank you for inviting me to testify about testing and accountability. in the elementary and secondary education act. i am paul leather, deputy commissioner of education in the new hampshire department of education. in new hampshire we are working to explore what the next generation of assessments might look like.

we coordinated with council for priorities of reauthorization. these contain three important ingredients. it will continue to support annual assessments of student performance to ensure every parent receives information they need on how their child is performing. at least once a year. second, it would allow states to base students' annual determinations on a single standardized test or the combined results from a coherent system of assessments. third, it gives states the space to continue to innovate on assessment and accountability systems through a locally designed assessment system, so important when the periods of authorization can last ten years or longer. we are working in collaboration with four new hampshire school districts to pilot competency-based systems. we are intent on broadening expectations from simple

recitation of knowledge and facts while fostering work study practices like persistence and creativity. that is why we have emphasized performance assessments for competency education or pace which is what we call our pilot project. there are several key components in our pilot, development of statewide model competencies that describe knowledge and skills that all students are expected to master, use of personalized competency based approach and awarding credit and the use of common and local performance-based assessments of competencies throughout each school year in tandem with great spend smarter balance assessments. i am submitting a detailed summary of all steps we are taking to ensure comparability reliability and validity of the assessments and a brief description of the demographics of the participating districts.

second we support annual determinations based on a coherent system of state and local multiple assessment. rather than relying on one to make this determination we combine a series of assessment results to make the annual determination. over the last year there has been a crescendo of voices across the country raising the concern of overtesting. we believe that the overtesting issue has arisen because there has been a disconnect between local and state assessments. i have sat through many school board meetings where the superintendent explains to the board the state test results and their meaning and then describes their local assessment. these two sets of assessments and two accountability systems overlap and in some cases are redundant. our pace pilot braids these together. the result is less assessment overall with a more coherent

system which provides benchmark information without sacrificing much deeper more actionable information at the classroom level. because of our work advancing competency-based learning model we understand the importance of creating freedom to innovate. we have been working on this system for three solid years starting with intensive professional development to raise the assessment literacy of our teachers. we are not ready to take it statewide but we hope to in the future. in new hampshire the live free or die state we believe that it is essential that local educational leaders help build the new system through innovative efforts. it is the combination of state and local creative collaboration that helped us build a new stronger more effective assessment and accountability system. we applaud the draft version section k that allows for a locally designed assessment system in option two. however, we also believe that congress should establish parameters in the reauthorization to ensure that

locally designed systems do not result in a step backwards for students. we expect assurances of technical quality and assessments necessary be put in place. within a state local districts wishing to innovate should be able to demonstrate that they will continue to focus on college or career outcomes and are committed to improving the achievement of disadvantaged students. they should maintain a clearly described internal accountability process and have leadership necessary to effect substantive change process. with these parameters in place we believe that educational improvements and innovative design will flourish throughout the life of the coming reauthorization. we in new hampshire greatly appreciate the opportunity to have our innovative educational practices considered by the committee. we look forward to the future of a speedy authorization of improved elementary and secondary education.

thank you. >> thank you, mr. leather. mr. boasberg, welcome. >> thank you for this opportunity to be with you here this morning. my name is tom boasberg, i am superintendent of denver public schools. we have seen remarkable progress in the last decades under reform started by senator bennett at a time when he had a job with truly complex and challenging policy issues to grapple with. in that time we have increased our number of graduates by over 1,000 students a year, increased on time graduation rate for our african-american, latino students by over 60%. we have decreased our dropout rates by over 60%. we have gone from a school district with our students having the lowest rate of year on year student progress of any major district in the state to being now the district for three years in a row where our students on a student by student basis are demonstrating the

highest rate of yearly academic progress. as a result our enrollment is booming as families come back to and stay in our schools. in the last seven years our enrollment has increased by a remarkable 25%. nevertheless we continue to have significant achievement gaps between our students based on income and race and ethnicity. we are determined to eliminate those achievement gaps. one key to our progress is our refusal to be imprisoned by debates and false complex. we need to focus on what works for our kids. we can't be stuck in an either or world. the needs of our kids over 70% of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch are too great. what does that world look like? it's a world where we can dramatically improve our district schools, unleash creative energy of our teachers to open innovative new schools and at the same time welcome

high performing charter schools, a world where both district run and charter schools work together as public schools to drive greater equity in our community. it is a world where we do measure the progress of our kids to see whether they are on track to graduate from high school prepared for college and career. it is also a world where we care deeply about nurturing and developing the whole child, expanding opportunities for artseepening interest and nurturing our kids' physical, social and emotional growth. there does not need to be a conflict here. in fact, the experiences show the schools that most emphasize a broad curriculum and promote creativity and critical thinking are the ones that do best in helping develop literacy abilities. when we went to denver voters

two years ago for a tax increase the first thing we asked for was funding to increase arts, music and sports. as a parent of three kids and a superintendent for 90,000 do i care about seeing the progress my kids make every year in literacy and math? of course i do. of course, i at the same time care deeply about opportunities in creative arts and social sciences and sports and their personal growth as members of our community. i do believe that annual measures of progress for our kids in literacy and math are vital. at the same time as i have advocated in our state we need fewer and shorter tests. for example, i do not see why we cannot have good measures of student progress that are limited to no more than three or four hours combined time for literacy and math per year, less than one half of 1% of classroom time. we need to eliminate other tests

added that are unrelated to the law before this committee today. the new generation of assessments do a good job of helping us understand how our children are progressing in literacy and math. this transparency of how kids are doing is vital. vital for students, for parents and for teachers. likewise, having annual data about students' growth is vital to see what is working best in our schools. transparency and the holding of clear high standards are important for all kids but particularly for our kids in poverty and kids of color. historically too many of our most vulnerable students have not been held to high standards that enable them to compete for and succeed in college and the knowledge intensive careers in today's economy and is absolutely essential that we do so. that is why accountability is also vital.

not in a blaming or punishment sense but to recognize what is not working and make necessarily changes in the high stakes work we are all committed to to help children and families break out of poverty and help all kids realize the potential they are born with. as we celebrate the birthday of reverend martin luther king jr. i hope we can help all of our kids live in the both and world that they deserve. >> mr. henderson. alexander, and members of the committee. i am president and ceo of the leadership conference on civil and human rights. the nation's leading coalition with over 200 national organizations working to build an america as good as its ideals. i'm also the professor of public interest law at the clark school of law university of district of columbia. i serve as the vice chair of the

board of trustees of the educational testing service, the nation's premiere testing assessment nonprofit corporation. thank you for inviting me to testify on the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act. the civil and human rights community has long seen education and voter participation as the twin pillars of our democracy. together they help to make the promise of equality and opportunity for all a reality in american life. we welcome the opportunity that this important and timely hearing provides to look at ways that we can improve esea and ensure that each and every child regardless of race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability or zip code receives the best education that this great nation can provide. senator murray thank you for acknowledging the parents who have come in from around the country, states like

washington, colorado, tennessee, minnesota, delaware to have their voices amplify the concerns that we reflect in our testimony today. significantly, this year we mark the 50th anniversary of esea which was a pillar of president lyndon johnson's war on poverty. congress recognized then and has for the past five decades that children living and going to school in poverty and especially those living in concentrated poverty need more, not fewer resources than their more advantaged peers. today we speak with one voice on behalf of all of our children, girls and boys, students of color, students not yet proficient in english, those who have disabilities or are homeless or migrant, those in the criminal juvenile justice system and those in foster care, living in the streets or living in the shadows.

we speak with deep concern and growing alarm about increasing child poverty, the persistent low achievement of students with disabilities and the growing income inequality in our nation, particularly as they are reflected and reinforced by grotesque disparities in resources available to high and low poverty schools. education is more important today than before. a high school diploma is not just enough to access the jobs of today and tomorrow. students now need post secondary education or further training after high school. so we cannot ignore the fact that state and local school financing systems have been unfair and inadequate. we know that money spent wisely can and will make an enormous difference in the ability of high poverty schools to prepare our students for college and career. we also know that money spent on high quality preschool is one of the best investments we could make. that's why a group of more than

20 national organizations created a set of principles which call on congress to maintain and improve strong accountability requirements. our approach to accountability is straightforward and sensible. first esea must continue to require high quality annual statewide assessments for all students in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school that are aligned with and measure each student's progress towards meeting the state's college and career ready standards. next statewide accountability systems must support all students to make enough progress every year so that they are on track to graduate from high school ready for college and career. states must set annual district and school targets for grade level achievements. high school graduation and closing achievement gaps for all students including accelerated progress for each major racial and ethnic group, students with

disabilities, english language learners and students from low income families and evaluate schools and districts on how well they meet these targets. third, states and school districts need to improve data collection and reporting to the public on student achievement and gap closing, course completion, graduation rates, per pupil expenditures, opportunity measures and school climate indicators including decreases in the use of exclusionary discipline practices, use of police in schools and student referrals to law enforcement. this data must be disaggregated by all categories listed previously but notably disability, gender, race, national origin. i want to conclude by expressing serious concerns with your proposal as it is currently written. we have great respect for you but the proposal as we

understand it today is detailed in our written testimony and it needs to be, we hope addressed. the bill as a general manner bends over backwards to accommodate the interest of state and local government entities that have both failed our children and avoided any real accountability for failures. the federal government must continue to hold states and school districts accountable for the degree to which they are improving education for all students especially students who have been under served by the system for far too long. congress must not pass an esea. >> you are well over. >> i will bring it to a conclusion. thank you for the opportunity to be here and i look forward to your questions. >> thank you. >> thank you, chairman alexander and senator murray, for your vision and for this opportunity to offer my remarks regarding impact of testing accountability on our public school children.

i'm also a parent of a sixth grader, 11-year-old, and so i speak to you both as a public school parent and as a teacher. i want to provide some context that i've learned about the current educational policies and they're driven by business. the use of competitive performance based practices have long been assumed to motivate workers. microsoft and adobe systems are some of the companies who adopted stack ranking, the practice of applying rewards, consequences and rankings based on forum ans. these same business advisers have informed many of our nation's biggest districts including mine. in the past few years, these businesses have abandoned this practice because they have proven to have disastrous effects on collaboration, problem solving and innovation. what was bad for business has been disastrous for public education. a field already plagued with recruitment and retention challenges. i worked in different schools. some of them through no fault of their own have become increasingly data driven, as

opposed to student driven. i'm fortunate currently to be working in this public school that was founded on the principles of whole child education, where we teachers collaborate to develop curriculum and create relevant assessments. it is the antithesis of stack ranking. this year, fourth and fifth graders are immersed in a study called rights and responsibilities. students velazquez around the origins of the united states, the institution and discuss the complex struggles we have made as a nation. these are 8 to 10-year-olds. my class decided to divide themselves into groups. they are the researchers. my integrated co-teaching classroom consists of students with disabilities, or i should say all abilities, and they work in heterogeneous groups to present their understandings through a variety of mediums. they're learning how to learn, developing life-long skills, researching, analyzing

information from multiple sources, collaborating with others, and sharing what they have learned in creative and thought provoking ways. they are the stewards of their learning, guided by their interests and passions. i share this not as a best practice, but to emphasize the importance of fostering learning environments that value a culture of trust diversity and autonomy, not a focus on test preparation. teachers working conditions are inextricably tied to students learning conditions. when parents and educators have voiced concerns they have been accused of coddling. i want to challenge that assumption. the great crimes that the focus on testing has taken valuable resources and time away from programming. social studies arts and physical education, special education, services and ell programs. at my school we no longer have a librarian. our parent association works full time to fund the needed arts and music programs that are not covered by our budget any longer. and we're one of the lucky

schools. what about schools where parents must work to just survive? there is nothing more painful to watch or forced to be complicit with than the minimalizing that is happening in our schools. teachers students and parents are finding themselves in a position of whether or not to push back or leave so who is left to receive these tests and akpgccompanying sanctions? last year over 50% of our parents at our school refused to allow their children to take the new york state common core assessments. what we now have known nationally as opting out. and we were not alone. i want to remind folks that the latin route of assessment means to sit alongside. until we have teachers and policymakers sitting alongside and getting to know our students and our classrooms in deep and meaningful ways, we cannot fully understand the state of public

education and i sit here as a sole female, and this is a field dominated by women. no corporate made multiple choice test will give you that data. last year i decided i'm obligated to my students and their families and that's why as a teacher of conscience i will refuse to administer tests that reduce my students to a single metric and will continue to take this position until the role of standardized assessments are put in their proper place. we just celebrated the life of martin luther king jr. in his letter from a birmingham jail, he affirms one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. he quotes st. augustine, an unjust law is no law at all. so long as education policy is shaped by the interests of corporate profiteering and not the interests of our public schoolchildren, we will resist these unjust testing laws. i am hopeful we can sit alongside each other and do the hard work of answering the questions most central to our democracy. what is the purpose of public education in a democratic society? how can we ensure that all

children receive enriching and equitable education and how do we support teachers and schools in carrying out their missions to educate all. thank you and i appreciate all your questions. >> thank you ms. lee. mr. lazar. >> senator alexander, senator murray, and distinguished members of the committee it is an honor to testify before you today. i come as a proud national board certified public high schoolteacher. i teach at harvest collegiate high school in new york city. my students who are listening to us now and who i need remind to study for their history test tomorrow represent the full diversity of our city. i'm also embarrassed to say i was a teacher who every may until last would get up to apologize to my students. i would tell them i have done my best job to be an excellent teacher for you up until now. but for the last month of school, i'm going to turn into a bad teacher to properly prepare you for state regents exams. we would then repeatedly write

stock formulaic essays. i did this because standardized tests measure the wrong things. i did this because the stakes for my students forced me to value three hours of testing over a year of learning. i did this because the standardized test was the only way for my students to demonstrate their learning to the government. right now the federal incentives in education are wrong. because of this, too many schools are designed in large part as my may was, to get students to do well on a one-time test. where as schools should organize themselves around student learning. making the tests the curriculum harms all students. but it does the most harm to those with the lowest skills. when i taught seniors in the bronx, i worked with the highest performing students to help prepare them for college.

we read philosophical tests ranging from conte and wrote and revised college level essays. at the same time i worked with the lowest performing students who had yet to pass the state tests. with them, we did mindless test prep. and even though i was really good at it, getting 100% of those students to pass their exams in my final year doing it i was doing the students no favors. i think to this day about tee, a senior who could hardly write and struggled to read. she passed the test but she was not -- she was still not ready for the community college work she encountered that fall. when we focus our efforts on helping struggling students jump over the hurdle of mandated exams, the learning and opportunity gap widens. my current school, harvest collegiate, is a member of the new york performance standards

consortium, a group of 48 schools that offer an alternative model. we use a more rigorous assessment system than the state exams. within consortium schools, assessments are not an on demand test, but a college level based assessment. students complete real and authentic disciplinary work giving them a significant advantage over others once they enter college. the consortium is widely successful, with graduation and college success rates exceeding the rates for all new york city public schools. models like the consortium need to be able to exist and expand within any reauthorized bill. now, despite its many well known flaws, no child left behind did include some important features that should not be abandoned. its disaggregation has pucht a much needed spotlight on how american youth is negatively affected by economic and social

inequality. that is why i believe that a stance opposed to any requirement for student assessment is misguided. yes, every student must count. especially our students with the greatest needs. but we can do this without testing every kid every year. we could use grade span testing for elementary and middle school as we already do in high school. we could even go a step further and use the representational sampling technique of the nape, universally considered to be the gold standard of educational assessment in the united states. i support the position of my union, the aft, then reauthorizing esea congress should remove the high stakes mandated tests limit the number of tests used for accountability purposes, and allow schools to use more sophisticated and useful assess tools such as performance assessments. to do this requires a better balance of government's role in education with that of local decision-making. federal and state governments

need to recognize the best educational decisions for students are made by those who possess the fullest and deepest understanding of their needs. educateor voices need to be the loudest in making the decisions of what is tested, how students are tested, and when students are tested. senators, my students, my colleagues and i are all encouraged and inspired that congress is putting serious thought into how to improve the education of all our nation's students. it is time to fix our broken system of testing and accountability. >> thank you very much. this has been an extraordinary variety of views. it is very helpful to us as senators and i thank senator murray and the staffs of both -- for working to have us present those different points of views. and thank you, all. you get an a for sticking to five minutes. i thank you for that. and i hope we'll see if the senators do as well as our time comes. i'll begin with a period of questions.

i'll take my five minutes and senator murray and after that senator collins senator warren nor roberts, senator bennett will be the first four. and we'll go based on first arrival. we'll conclude the hearing by noon. let me start dr. west. you seem to be saying this see if i got it right. keep the tests maybe make them more flexible keep the disaggregation of the results keep the accountability system but let the states create the accountability system. i got that about right? >> that's about right. in my view, there is a clear federal role to -- sorry. >> let me before you -- keep thinking about your answer. let me go to something else. just to frame the question we're talking about testing and accountability and sometimes

that gets off into educationese and i have to refresh myself every 15 minutes about it, even though i've been fooling with it for years. the federal government under no child left behind requires 17 annual standardized tests, right? >> that's correct. >> seven tests in math, seven in reading, once each year in grades three through eight and once in high school. that's -- and then three tests in science, once in grades three through five, once in grade six through nine and once in high school. these are 17 tests that must be used by laws that primary means of determining the yearly academic performance of the state and each school district and school in the state. but those aren't the only tests that kids take. and i think that's one spotlight we ought to put on today. i would like for you to think about that and other members and answer to the question. for example, the excellence in education foundation in florida reported that in florida, in addition to the 17 federal

tests, there are between 8 and 200 tests administered in schools each year on top of those tests. those are administered by the state government. and required by local government. and in lee county, florida, ft. myers, there were 183 state and local tests and in addition to the 17 federal tests. and when this report put the spotlight on the lee county tests, they said, well, maybe that's too many tests and they started giving fewer tests. as we're talking about too many tests, and what kind of tests certainly too many tests, i think i would like to have your thoughts about whether the culprit is the federal 17 tests, or whether it is all the state and local tests, or is it because of the high stakes in the federal 17 tests that is causing the state and local governments to create so many local tests? i think the most difficult issue we have to figure out is this

testing and accountability issue. i mean, testing with goals standards, tests and then the accountability is really what are the consequences? what is the definition of success on the test? what is the definition of failure and what are the consequences of failure? and really the debate is what decides that? do we decide that here or do states decide that there? i think i hear you saying washington should keep the 17 tests and the disaggregation, but states should design the accountability systems. >> that is in fact, an accurate summary of my recommendation. as i said we don't have great data on the amount of testing that is going on for various purposes everywhere around the nation. but the studies that have been conducted like the one you referenced in the state of florida do suggest that the bulk of testing time is not devoted

to the 17 federally mandated exams. that being said, i do think a lot of those tests are adopted by schools in an attempt to prepare themselves for the federally mandated annual exams precisely because those exams carry so much weight with respect to how their schools are going to be treated by the accountability system. that accountability system sets up unrealistic expectations with respect to student achievement, those expectations are most challenging for schools that serve students that face a lot of disadvantaged -- >> i'm going to mr. leather or mr. boasberg in my few remaining seconds. does new hampshire and colorado require a lot of extra tests in addition to the 17 federal tests or do you and your local school district require a lot of extra tests or is as a result of the 17 federal tests? >> in new hampshire, we just require the basic federal

expectation of the 17 tests plus we have alternative assessments for students with disabilities as well as students with english language learners. but that's what we do. >> mr. boasberg? >> they have adopted other tests and these are tests -- we as a state have adopted certain other tests in colorado and i and other superintendents in the state are urging that the state not require those additional tests beyond, again, annual testing in third through tenth grade in literacy and math and the science test. >> thank you. senator murray? >> mr. henderson, since no child left behind passed in 2001, we have seen achievement gaps narrow for black and latino students in both reading and math according to the nap long-term trend data and the dropout rate has been cut in half. i wanted you to talk about what you saw the role that the elementary and secondary education acts assessment

accountability provisions played in narrowing those achievement gaps and increasing graduation rates. >> it is a very important question, senator murray. thanks for asking it. we have seen that the federal governments mandated requirements under esea and no child left behind indeed have helped to push greater accountability on the part of state systems to address the particular needs of poor students and often students of color, students with disabilities. in the absence of those standards, we fear that there will be a rollback of requirements that are otherwise producing the positive results that you have identified. we have seen, for example, in the states that were given waivers under the previous law that in many instances those waivers have allowed those state systems to avoid the kind of meaningful accountability that actually drives the kind of change that you talked about. senator alexander, you mentioned the proliferation of states

tests at the state and local level and that may well be true. but i think the federal requirements that are in place have been so important in producing the kind of high school and career ready graduation rates that are really important. when -- i started school when brown versus the board of education was first decided. i can assure you that here in washington, d.c. there was a tremendous absence of the kind of consistent standards that helped to produce the kind of change that we have seen and that senator murray has cited. and in the absence of esea standards, i am convinced that there will be the use of title one funds for students who do not otherwise qualify, and a step back from the federal government's commitment to ensure the positive results that senator murray cited. it makes a difference. >> mr. henderson, what would you -- improvements would you recommend as we reauthorized to

make progress, to close that achievement gap? >> i think that you have many schools that lack the kind of financial equity and commitment to students that either their state constitution requires or that common sense for purposes of producing positive results would require. i cite senator roberts of kansas which has a supreme court decision indicating that the state's funding of its schools is unconstitutional by kansas' own constitutional requirement and the result has been a significant lack of compliance on the part of the state and its ability to educate its students. senator casey, i've seen the same thing in pennsylvania, where the failure of the previous governor to invest in resources to address the problem, the shortcoming in funding of schools has been significant. so in my judgment, these standards help to drive the kind of investments that states must make in their educational system

to ensure that their students do meet the challenges of today and prepare to meet the challenges of tomorrow. what i would hope is that there would be restrictions on the casual use of title one title 1 funding for students who are not eligible for title 1 and to require that those funds be used precisely for what they were intended and that is to help the poorest of students. >> thank you. mr. lazar you mentioned that your classroom, that is apparently watching you, is very diverse in terms of their background and learning styles and performances. how do high-quality assessments help you cater to your students' unique needs? >> at my school we've developed a fairly robust system and have designed tasks that are accessible to a range of performances. so this includes something like when we were studying the declaration of independence later, there would be accessible

reading to all students and then they had to write an argument about what the declaration of independence really means. so that's a task that even somebody reading on a fourth grade level could say something intelligent about but my students that are doing better work now than i was a few years into college are able to approach that task in a really sophisticated way. the key thing is how we use that information, we use that to inform what happens in our classrooms. we use that to inform how we professionally develop our teachers and then we judge ourselves based on how students are doing in similar tasks later in the year. so we're trying -- we're measuring growth so we're not just happy with some kids making progress. we're looking at all of our students, even the ones doing amazingly well and ensuring we are continuing to push them as well as the students who are struggling. >> thank you very much. >> senator collins. >> thank you, mr. chairman. first, mr. chairman and ranking

member senator murray, let me tell you what a pleasure it is to return to this committee after an absence of many years. some people would say that i was here when we crafted no child left behind. but remember, i was very young then. in 2005, former senator olympia snowe and i, in response to a lot of concerns about the law put together an nclb task force to evaluate the impact of the law in maine and we had parents teachers, educational specialists, superintendent school board members. so it was really a broad group. and the task force identified several unintended consequences

of the law's requirement per annual tests. they included increased test anxiety for students loss of teaching time, misinterpretation of the meaning of schools classified as failing when they didn't make adequate process and the scapegoating of certain subgroups, like those special education students and english language learner populations. our task force concluded that states needed greater flexibility and they recommended allowing states to measure student progress over grade spans, which has been witnessed by some of our witnesses today and to track student growth over time. as we know, the current measures schools grade by grade, essentially comparing this

year's forth graders with last year's fourth graders. the approach that was recommended by our task force, known as grade span testing, essentially is looking at the same students and seeing whether they have progressed, which intrigues me. and before the no child left behind law was passed that was the approach used in maine and it allowed maine to track the progress of the individual students and gave students greater flexibility. my question to each of you and some of you have touched on this is do you believe that giving states the flexibility to choose grade span testing which is used now for science and would help resolve the concerns about

overtesting that have been expressed or would the result be that we decrease accountability? and if i could just start and go straight across with dr. west. >> okay. so i actually think it would be very difficult under a grade span testing regime to develop a fair system of accountability because actually with the testing it becomes harder to look at the progress over time. you're looking at their performance at a certain point in time, at their end point in time at a given grade configuration, elementary, middle or high school. at that point, you are focused on the level at which they are performing which i said is heavily influenced by things outside of this school's control. those systems have a punishing effect on schools serving low-performing students and yielding very inaccurate information about the school's

effectiveness. >> thank you. mr. leather? >> yeah, i would add that we really need consistency. we need to make sure every parent receives information about how their child is performing academically and it really have to guess on the off year how their student issing doing are they meeting academic goals and whether their school is working to improve performance. research shows that a year of ineffective learning occurs for a student -- and there's lots of reasons why that could happen -- that students fall behind and their growth is really impeded in successive years. i think the more we keep track of how students are doing, the better off those students are going to be, the better off their parents are going to be in terms of their expectations. >> thank you. and i'd echo professor west's

comments and the importance of growth, the importance of measuring the same students as they grow from one year to the next because that is what is most relevant. it's not how this year did against last year fourth graders. it's how did those students do from one year to the next. you need annual measurements in order to see that growth from one year to the other. because to measure how they did in fifth grade and then eighth grade, there's so much that intervenes and it's equally important for high-achieving kids as low-achieving kids. if you're a parent who is a year ahead of grade level, you don't just want to be told that kid is at standard. that means the kid might have lost an entire year of learning. you want to see how much growth did that high-achieving student make. likewise, with the low-achieving student, those kids need to catch up. to say that they are just at standard, how much have they

grown? are they on a trajectory, hopefully within a short period of time to get back on full track to be ready to graduate and be ready for post-secondary. so without annual measurements, you simply can't measure growth in a meaningful way. >> mr. chairman i'd note that i'm over my time. could i have the rest respond for the record? >> well yes. and one is i appreciate you saying that because every senator uses 4 1/2 minutes and then says, what do you all think, we'd be here all afternoon. but -- it's been done before. but we want to know what you think. so, yes please send us your thoughts. but i'd like to invite the other three and then supplement it later. >> thank you. >> mr. chairman, thank you. i associate myself with the remarks of my colleagues who

have already spoken about the importance of annual assessments as a way of determining progress. but i would also mention there are collateral factors that affect the performance of students that we haven't talked about. obviously poverty is a huge issue for kids that come to school under those circumstances and we have teachers who are misaligned with their ability to really impart education. we need teachers who are well trained to go to schools that most need their services and assistance and there are other factors that obviously affect student performance including school discipline that often runs amuck in terms of the interest of students. >> thank you for your comments. miss lee? >> i want to argue that teachers assess every day in multiple ways and these standardized assessments that you speak of

can only measure right or wrong type questions and we want our students to be able to solve are much more complex. so to be able to quantify it, i think, is difficult. another point is that in new york state at least, these tests have changed year to year which makes them flawed or invalid will. i wanted to put that out there. >> mr. lazar? >> we need to focus on where the student is compared to where they were. the thing i want us to be careful about is that it's the learning driving the assessment instead of the accountability driving the assessment. i think we do need to assess regularly like miss lee said we assess our kids every day. i do think parents need information about how schools are doing year to year. i don't think the federal or

state government needs accountability attached to yearly tests. if we need to have federal and state accountability based on some sort of assessment, let's have that be as small and as little intrusion into real learning as possible. >> thank you. >> senator warren? >> thank you, mr. chairman. i'm looking forward to working with you and ranking member murray on this committee this year. the federal government provides billions of dollars every year to the states to support public education and it's a lot of money. so i think we should start with accountability. the accountability of the states that take this money. if the states are going to get federal tax dollars to improve public education systems then we need to make sure that those dollars are not being wasted but they are actually being used to improve education. one of the reasons that republicans and democrats came together with no child left behind in the first place was

the federal government got really good at shoveling tax dollars out the door but not very good at improving student achievement. there are a lot of problems with no child left behind. but according to the most recent education assessment, over the past 12 years, both reading and math performance across the country has risen for all groups of students. poor children, wealthy children urban children rural children minority children they are all doing better. so while we all agree that there need to be changes here we need some basic accountability on the part of the states to make sure that these billions of dollars in tax money are actually buying us better education for our children. so mr. boasberg, you've reviewed the proposal for reforming no child left behind. are you confident that the republican draft proposal would ensure that the states who take

the federal dollars will be held accountable for improving student achievement? >> so thank you. and without speaking to details in the draft that's obviously your prerogative. i do agree, both as a taxpayer and as an educator, that accountability is very important. again, accountability not in the blaming or punishment sense but accountability in the sense of needing to make change. that when schools are failing and where kids aren't making the progress they need to where they aren't graduating there is -- has to be accountability to make change. and that change is very difficult. it's politically controversial it's messy sensitive there's resistance to it. but it's essential that change happen to close our achievement gaps and to give our kids who have been disadvantaged the opportunities that they deserve. so i do believe that accountability is very important. our system in denver absolutely looks at student growth, looks

at this aggregated data and looks at important things like graduation graduation rates parent satisfaction and the importance of multiple measures that i agree with but at bottom we need to be accountable when kids are not learning to make change. >> so as i read the republican draft proposal all a state would have to do to get federal dollars is to submit a plan with a bunch of promises with no proof that the promises are ever kept and the department of education would lose any meaningful tools to make sure that the states actually follow through on this. mr. henderson, you've worked hard to make sure that those children who face the greatest hurdles have real educational opportunities. do you see anything in this proposal that would make sure that the states who take this money actually end up helping the kids who need it most? >> senator warren, unfortunately, i do not. i think the bill now would allow this draft would allow the

states to repurpose title 1 funded to serve otherwise ineligible students. and without any measurable accountability to make sure that students who are most in need get the support and resources they most deserve. you know interestingly enough your point about taxpayer accountability was just reinforced within the last several days by the george w. bush institute which issued a report under the authorship of margaret spelling for purposes of ensuring that dollars and tax dollars are indeed well spent. from the standpoint of those concerned about the services provided when you allow states to weaken standards and we've seen how states have used waivers to create a de-facto weakening of standards, we are deeply concerned that the interest of every student but the student we most represent will not be adequately serviced. >> well, i understand the need

for flexibility. but if the only principle here is that the states can do whatever they want, then they should raise their own taxes to pay for it. throwing billions of federal dollars at the states with no accountability for the states for how they spend taxpayer money is not what we were sent here to do. so thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you senator warren. and i didn't welcome senator collins to the committee which i should. we're delighted to have them back. she and senator cassidy are the only new senators this year. and you're not really new. senator roberts? >> thank you mr. chairman. number one, i would observe that we have flipped the seating arrangement here. there's a brand-new start. the lights are a little brighter. the heat is a little warmer. you can see what the majority used to enjoy.

but basically, i observed the minority is to your right and we, sir, are to your left which is seldom. but at any rate just thought i'd make that observation. i'd like to concentrate on the teachers -- stephen, how do you pronounce your last name? >> lazar. >> that's what i figured. thank you for your statements on behalf of teachers. some years ago, way before senator collins i was a teacher for three years. i worried about standard deviation. i had a principal who insisted on doing that and we finally had meaningful dialogue and i was free from that effort. i have no idea how you teach x number of months the way you want to teach and then one month being, quote a done teacher and

i think it was jia who pointed out the mindless test preparation. thank you for your viewpoint. i'm pleased we're looking into this issue. i want to let everybody know the witnesses and thank you all for coming, this is a working draft. this isn't set in stone. and so that's why we have you here. as a democrat view it's a working draft and i think that should be emphasized. i'm concerned about recent administration efforts to side step waivers to state. a waiver is not a waiver. they are only preferred education process. but kansas has created a statewide commission and by the

way our state legislature will handle that with the courts. but at any rate, we created a statewide commission to develop principal evaluations. it's been a statewide approach to design a robust system but the department of education is going beyond the statute and issuing conditioned waivers. back in august of last year, kansas agreed that the department of education's requirements and they were informed that their esea was fully approved and they would no longer be labeled high-risk status. that's a pattern that we've seen nationwide and it's clear to me that the administration has tried to query states for something called common core. i introduced the lower level act to prohibit the government from

intervening and through mandates, grants or waivers or any form of manipulation. i appreciate the chairman's draft. it is going in the right direction, i believe, in reducing the federal footprint but still providing accountability. i look forward to hopefully include my language in the final draft. i just don't think washington has any business dictating what is best for students and what they deserve and to make commonsense changes to simplify the law without sacrificing any accountability. the question i have basically is, does continued reliance on testing strike the best balance or what is the most effective paired back accountability that still ensures an education for all, as well as fiscal stewardship. i've done exactly what the chairman said i would do, talk

for 4 minutes and now 42 seconds but i'd like to ask jia and stephen to address that question. stephen? or jia you go first. >> i definitely see the role of assessments, you know, at a larger level but reviewing that at the state level, i feel that the federal's role in addressing senator warren's concerns is to ensure that states are using tax dollars appropriately for public education and hasn't happened in our state. our state has not been held accountable to those federal tax dollars. but what i do feel is that there needs to be a balance, a communication. and if you were to ask me what my vision is, it's to create alongside educators alongside district a system that involves

much more comprehensive assessments and ways of communicating information besides the single metric. that can be very flawed. so i just wanted to put that out. >> mr. chairman can i ask stephen to summarize in 20 seconds or something like that? >> i'll try to do less. we need better and more diverse assessments used primarily to help schools and teachers adopt and plan we need to remove high stakes from those assessments. we then need to limit accountability through the use of grade span or representation nal sampling. >> i appreciate that. thank you, mr. chairman. >> lazar gets the award for succinctness today. senator bennett and then scott if he is here and then senator franken. well, let's just go to senator bennett and we'll see who is here after that.

>> thank you, mr. chairman. i hope that wasn't as reluctant as it sounded. i read last week and others in the committee i'm sure did as well that for the first time in the country's history, a majority of our public children are poor enough that they qualify for free and reduced lunch. that is a shameful situation that we find ourselves in and when no child left behind was passed, we couldn't say that. the majority of our children weren't that poor. they are today. and, in my view, that's why this discussion is so important because it was to create a system of accountability that showed us how kids were performing by income and also their ethnicity and it's demonstrated a huge achievement gap that exists in this country. and all of us have different policy issues that we focus on

but, in my mind, if you want to cure this problem of poverty in our country, the way to do that is by making sure people can read when they are in the first grade. that's the most important thing that we can do. and senator collins made an excellent point i thought earlier, which is no child left behind asked and answered the wrong question, which is how did this year's fourth graders do compared to last year's? and not only the wrong question but an irrelevant question if you're a fourth grader becoming a fifth grader but then there was high-stakes accountability tied to that that meant that schools were responding to the wrong question by attempting to make changes, which in the end did not do much for the kids. the field has moved well beyond that. the people have moved well

beyond that and part of that is because of waivers that we're able to get and i wonder whether you could describe for the committee how you've used student growth measures to drive change in the school district, how does it inform the district's policies with respect to choice and i think we would benefit from understanding that. this is bigger than just what is happening in a single classroom someplace and i guess if you get hit, the important distinction between growth and status for the committee. >> so thank you. and i think that is the fundamental question. they look at the percentage of kids that are proficient or grade level and as professor west mentioned, it's more likely to predict where kids start and how much they are learning in school. and so where we have moved is looking at growth, which is how much progress does a student make from one year to the next? and again, that's equally

important for high-achieving students as is for low-achieving students. when you just measure status, i.e., are they at grade level, you're ignoring well above and ignoring kids well below because it's unlikely their status will change from one year to the next but you want to see their growth, you want to see how much they are learning so we look first and foremost at growth because, for example we used to have schools where the students were relatively high status but their growth was low. and they coasted. congratulate us. kids weren't really doing that well. when we begin to disaggregate growth based on students with disabilities, that shone a light

on how kids were doing. and not just to shine a light but what are we going to do differently? what are we going to change to see more growth? and parents should visit schools and visit the teachers and see if they have the kind of teachers that we've talked about, teaching around critical thinking. but it's also important again for parents to see the growth. so we're very transparent about that and that's published. and particularly when you're in a district where parents do have choice where you have charter schools and district-run schools, it's extraordinarily important that parents get information about how much kids are growing. because if you have a system that says "x" percent are

proficient, a disincentive to take kids who are lower performing because somehow that will show you have "x" percent that are not at standard. but when you look at growth, you ee equally have that obligation to serve kids well. therefore, technically in an era of choice and accountability, for example, with charters we have to make decisions on what to close and we've closed more charter its in denver than the state has combined and that's helped us to encourage our growth and focus on the growth that kids are making year to year and make sure that the parents have that information about their kids and their schools. >> i'm out of time. thank you. >> thank you very much. senator burr? >> thank you all for being here sharing your knowledge and

suggestions with us. i've got to admit that senator warren stimulated something in my mind. because i agree with her. if we said to a state okay we're not going to take your tax money for education, we're going to let you keep it, and you figure out -- you fund education. the first question i thought of was, how many states would take us up on that? federal government gets out of my way, i get to decide how it's done and really the important question that came to my mind is how would they do it differently than today if in fact we got out of the way but we didn't penalize them financially, we put the burden on them. so i throw that out to you just as a thought to go through. this is extremely simple and i'll start on this end with mr.

west and then end with mr. lazar. my kids now adults, never tested well. it's probably genetic. but they didn't test well. so my question is this. is it more important that we know what students know or is it more important that we know that students are learning? dr. west? >> so it's much more important if we're trying to think about the performance of the school system to focus on what students are learning because that's what schools have more of an impact on. what students know at a given point in time is more influenced on genetics as you mentioned, perhaps, but by the family environment that they grew up on, a whole host of factors outside of the school's control. so when we're thinking of accountability, it should be for student learning. >> mr. leather?

>> yeah. it's a conundrum, i think to try to separate whether we need to know what they know versus what they are learning and i think you need to know both and in the end, is it student ready to make use of knowledge. >> do you reward a student for what they know or if they are learning. >> when i worked closely with the bush administration and that's not necessarily what you know. that's where you're learning. i think this got hijacked somewhere to where everything is about what they know. that's what the annual test is. >> sure. again, i think those two are pretty linked. i think we emphasized how much

students grow in every year, how much they are learning. at the same time, that's to a standard. it's very important that our kids graduate from high school ready for college or for career. that is a standard and it's a clear and articulable standard and it's important that we do everything to help our students and prepare our students and to have accountability and transparency are we graduating kids, are they prepared to succeed in college and in today's economy. >> mr. henderson? >> it's a philosophical question but it assumes that students begin on an even playing field. part of the concern i have about the way in which the question is framed is that students who are poor, students of color students of disability, students who are not proficient in english are not given the resources that they need and only through these assessments are we able to demonstrate that

the state has failed to meet either its own constitutional obligation under state constitutional law or whether they have failed to make the kind of progress that will allow them to continue doing what they are doing without interventions of the kind that the law would require. part of the problem that we have is that when states are given the kind of deference and latitude that they have, you see a weakening of standards you see a failure to invest in communities most in need, you see a reinforcement of existing inequalities about how schools are funded and there are no ways of reaching those problems because the state has no incentive to necessarily correct the problem other than to say, yes, the business community wants to have a stronger graduating pool. but leaders of the state are not held accountable by the failure to meet those standards unless the federal government steps in and i think the history of how

the waivers have been used and how states have squirmed out of their responsibility reinforces that point. >> thank you. miss lee? >> i want to start by saying many students who are brilliant are poor test takers and they go on to become brilliant people and go on to do amazing things. the tests alone does not define their value nor their contributions to society. so i want to emphasize the fact that these tests, again, they narrowly measure -- they are narrow measures. i can test my students on basic skills until you quantify that information, such as multiplication facts and spelling and when it comes to the knowledge that we're talking about, it's not easily quantifiable because it's limbless and there has to be a better way to assess students to share information that goes beyond the realm of the standardized assessments.

>> mr. lazar? >> my job is students learning but for my students i care what they know and what they can do. so i think schools should be accountable for students learning but i think students need to be held accountable for what they know and can do, which is exactly the model we used in consortia. students at the end of high school need to demonstrate master ree on four performance tests. we can do a much better job at helping students prepare for those and truly learning if we got rid of this notion that a kid who enters in ninth grade needs to be done four years later. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you senator burr. senator franken and then senator isakson. >> i want to thank the chairman and the ranking member for these great groups of witnesses and where we're getting. mr. boasberg i think you, from

senator bennett's question, hit on this question about growth. it's a great topic because a sixth grade teacher who brings a kid from a third grade level of reading to a fifth grade level of reading is a hero. under the proficiency, they are a goat. in minnesota, a race to the middle, they would focus on the kid just above proficiency and just below proficiency to get just above proficiency and the kid on top would be ignored and mr. lazar you hit on this, and the kid at the bottom would be ignored. to me, to do growth you've got to measure every year. now, i also think that you should do it in realtime all the assessments in realtime. that's why i like computer adaptive tests so the teacher can use the results to inform

their instruction. the nub that we're getting to i think is what kind of assessments you are making and because the assessments that measure these fine, little discrete skills that's what you're going to teach to. so that creates a occur reccurriculum that is focusing on the wrong thing. if we can create assessments that is measuring what miss lee or lazar want to measure to then we have the answer to our question. so what i'm saying is, when i go to talk to employers in minnesota, they want people who do critical thinking. they want people who can work in teams. we also have to make sure that they are accountable for making citizens and people who can think critically and really

learn and that's what everybody on this panel wants. so mr. boasberg i just want you to run with it and everyone else run with what i just said. >> great. thank you, senator. and i think you put it very, very well, about how important it is to care about growth for all kids and not just kids on a cusp of a particular line. >> the thing i liked about the law is called no child left behind. that's the thing i liked the most about it. >> and i'd also -- one of the things that we're very much looking forward to is the new generation of assessments which are introduced in the spring is a much more sophisticated set of assessment, it's centered around complex thinking, problem solving. it's not about rote mem rye zags. it's about the kinds of skills that we care about for our universities. at the same time again, we try

and create too much this one vessel of this assessment holds everything. it can't. i think you want a good assessment to measure progress and literacy and measure math at the challenge that we are seeing in the assessments introduced this year and to welcome multiple measures the performance-based assessments that mr. lazar and leather spoke about, to be able to judge, as miss lee said, no one assessment is going to be able to judge everything. so i think absolutely, again, this is not an either/or. to be able to have common statewide measures, sophisticated measures of student progress in literacy and math is essential. you can see how kids are doing from district to district. you can see where the best schools in the state working with english language learners. if you have completely different measurements you can't capture best practice. you can't understand where the most progress is being made. but again i think those should

be short. i don't -- i'd like to keep it to no more than four hours a year. but then welcome other more performance-based assessments and all of that should be part and parcel of what a teacher looks at what a school leader looks at and potentially if a state can get to that level, what a state looks at as well. >> anybody else want to weigh in? mr. lazar, on your performance criteria, don't you agree that if you're going to hold schools accountable, you have to have something that you can objectively look at but can you design a computer adaptive test, say, where you're filling in circles, can you design something that gets more at the kind of thing you want to measure? sorry. >> you can. it takes more time and it's more

expensive. i have worked on a lot of assessment development both at the city level and prototype tasks for smarter balance. it's a lot of hard work. it takes a lot of time and a lot of expertise to design those. i think if we were going to identify a role for the federal government in education it's put funds and resources behind test development and assessment development, do a range of them and make them available to schools to choose. because the type of work we do in my school we have a group of wonderful teachers who are committed to doing it and we've arranged the time in our program to be able to do that in large part through the pros initiative in new york city but what we do isn't something that all schools can start doing tomorrow. so if these assessments were out there and schools could choose the ones that fit their curricular needs we're in great shape. >> thank you, mr. lazar.

senator isakson? >> thank you mr. chairman and thanks to ranking member murray for having what i think is a very important hearing. i was listening to michael bennett talk a minute ago. i happen to be one of the two remaining members of congress who wrote no child left behind. everybody else has gone on to bigger and better things. and we would all tell you the following. last night when ted kennedy and i and george miller and john boehner were in the basement of the capitol and signed off on the conference committee report, we almost said in unison, you know, if this works we're going to be in trouble in six years because it's going to be harder and harder to do. so if we had done a reauthorization seven years ago, a lot of the problems that we know are going on right now wouldn't be going on because we would have corrected that. and number two this is not a defensive speech i'm making here but it's for educational purposes. assessment was very important.

dising a gre gags was very important and no child left behind did that. no child flew under the radar screen. we did something -- we always averaged them out and set our basic skills said we're doing "x." that wasn't good for johnny who couldn't read. i hate that reference but i have to use it. but we need johnly equally involved, too. i have a question for miss lee or a statement. i didn't get to hear your testimony and i apologize. we almost got there on reauthorization and it fell apart. i fought very hard to allow for alternative assessment for special needs children. to take a standard test for a disaggregated group and make a special needs student take it when you have assessments cognitive disabilities, connective disabilities, it's

impossible to have a one-size-fits-all assessment. i always thought it was best for the parent and teacher in the iep. >> as a special education teacher -- >> everybody make note of this answer now. >> i actually started teaching the first year of nclb so i've seen firsthand -- i actually started teaching in what was called a high school for students who were at risk. special education district in new york city. and what i found was that you're right no assessment fits all, including all students and what i would have to do in my assessments is diversify. what i know about my students, i assess them. again, sit alongside them get to know them and who they are, their abilities set very high standards, work with the parents

and the team. it's not just me. it was related service providers. you have experts and specialists coming in and we worked together as a team to develop assessments to determine students where they were and where we wanted -- and to set goals for them. so that work has continued and i feel as though, again, to echo steve lazar, that federal government has a role in ensuring that this was made possible at the states. >> one thing i learned as state board chairman in georgia, if your testing is not aligned with your curriculum krour never going to get good data. to align a test that we required with a curriculum that was national would blow up in our face because nobody wanted a colorado set of curriculum to apply to a georgia student. so what we did is we did a

random sample to try to assess the integrity of whatever assessment they were using. one thing the federal government could do is give them the excuse that we are making them do it but make sure the curriculum and alignment of testing are in line. if you do that, you find out what the students are learning. people say that's teaching to the test. that's what education is all about. if you teach a subject and you test what the student was taught, that's curriculum alignment and then you get a true measure of what they achieved. mr. henderson, you want to speak? >> yes. i think mainstream assessment means more students are going to have access to mainstream curriculum. one of the principles that the communities representing disabled students with disabilities have said is that the only exemption in the regulation is the students with the most severe cognitive disabilities. one of the concerns we have is

that you see frequently that students are misclassified as having emotional disturbance disabilities or being intellectually disabled and those labels frequently apply to students of color and they are then taken out of mainstream curriculum given inconsistent with the requirement of the law, access to less rigorous forms of academic accomplishment and the results have been disastrous for many of those communities. i think there is a real concern certainly among students representing persons with disabilities that they not be taken out needlessly from mainstream curricular offerings and that doesn't have anything to do with the kind of assessments that states might develop. i completely agree with mr. lazar. there should be a more sophisticated form assessment to provide the insights that these wonderful teachers have asked for but that's not inconsistent

with an annual assessment used to get diagnostic assessments of how communities are doing that might otherwise be left behind unless you have a uniform standard and application. >> my time's up. thank you both for the response and thank you for holding this hearing. >> okay. we have isakson and then baldwin, casey senator whitehouse and there should be time for all of you to have the full five minutes and then we'll be close to the noon hour when we want to conclude the hearing. senator baldwin? >> thank you, mr. chairman. and i'm very grateful to you and the ranking member to getting us off to a great start with a bipartisan dialogue and how we can best address the short comings of the no child left behind law and i'm hopeful we can find a path forward to fixing this law for all

students, parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers. we need -- we need this information, also. a great panel. thank you to the witnesses. a well-designed standardized test is one important tool among men that can help all of the stakeholders i just listed understand how well individual students are doing as well as how our nation's schools are serving all of our nation's children. and as such, we should know if the tests given, those required by federal law as well as those that are required by state and local districts are of high quality and aleanedigned to states' learning standards and how much time is spent and preparing for and taking the standardized test as opposed to instruction. in preparation for this very

debate, i introduced the smart act along with representative susan bonavicci in the house of representatives and senator murray and others here in the senate. the smart act is designed to update a specific federal grant program that already goes to states every year for assessment and development and implementation. it will allow states and districts to audit their assessment systems and reduce unnecessary and duplicative state and local tests with a design of freeing up more time for teaching and learning. i think this legislation presents a commonsense approach to help reduce unnecessary testing, which is why it has widespread support from our nation's largest teachers union and other education reform groups. i'd like to turn to our

panelists for their perspectives as well. particularly i'd like to ask both dr. west and mr. boasberg, because you've referenced the importance of these sort of audits of understanding what's truly happening across the country. can you talk about the importance of states and districts auditing their assessment systems and how such audits would take place at the state and local level? why not start with you dr. west, and then mr. boasberg. >> i have not reviewed this in detail but in general it's absolutely critical that officials have a good idea of the role that the testing is playing and the amount and quality of those tests as they try to understand how districts are trying to improve student learning. >> but did you testify that that was sort of lacking at this point? >> absolutely. we have very few systematic

evidence on this and there's a lot of confusion at the school building level. i've learned about what is being assessed and for what purpose. there's a lot of frustrations among teachers about a lack of alignment between an interim assessment program that hassed a men sistered to the tests over the course of the year to see how they are doing, a lack of alignment between those assessments and the schedule the schedule of the curriculum, essentially, the district and scope and sequence that they are designed to teach. so there's a huge potential gains for getting a better handle on this. i think it makes sense to encourage states and districts to do it. i would be cautious about the federal government trying to say that state districts to test less. we don't know the optimal amount. my understanding of what is going on in new hampshire is that as they move to a more competency-based model, they may

be testing more often. that may look bad in some audit or the premise is that we are testing too much and we have to get that down. i would be cautious about that type of heavy-handed approach. >> mr. boasberg? >> thank you. i think it's important that states and districts be very transparent about what is required and in our state we have a committee doing just that and that committee is making a series of recommendations to the legislator and it has nothing to do with no child left behind. we have published exactly what we do and what we don't do. there is also a balance of exactly what the federal government does and doesn't do. our teachers assess our kids in some way every day. that could be a little quiz a check for understanding, an exit ticket, that could be daily that could be weekly.

and boy, there's nothing that i would dread more than our teachers in some compliance exercise having to classify and record every single thing that could somehow be classified as an assessment or test of student progress. >> thank you, senator baldwin. senator casey? >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to thank the panel for being here today for your testimony, especially giving us firsthand information and experience from the trenches where a lot of you work. i wanted to -- i'll focus on a particular question for mr. henderson but i wanted to commend him and others who have talked about the broader context. this is a hearing about no child left behind, elementary and secondary education but at its core because of what those

policies and those strategies. it's also a hearing about child poverty and a hearing about other major challenges facing children. some of the numbers, just by way of a background some of the numbers on childhood poverty are really bone-chilling. there's a report from about a year ago -- and i'm sure they'll update it this january or soon -- from the oecd the organization for economic cooperation and development. and they ranked kind of the top 20 countries on a whole range of areas. one of them is on child poverty. so we're -- of the top 20 in the world, we are fifth from the worst. our child poverty rate -- this is a 2010 number -- it will be updated. 21.2% of children in the united states live in poverty. we are just a little better than spain and italy and we're not too far off from mexico and

turkey by way of example. if you update it the organization that tracks data on children, the foundation found that childhood poverty number in 2012 is even higher. it goes to 23%. it puts up higher than chile. by that ranking, we're fourth from the worst, not fifth. when you look at that data and look at the data on progress that has been made and some of it can be attributable to public policy when you step back and look at all of these issues, what we have not done for our kids is really a national and i would say bipartisan failure. after world war ii we had the g.i. bill which was a good idea and we did a lot of things that were smart at that time but we also had for europe, a marshal plan but we've never ever had anything even approaching a

marshal plan for our kids. so that's the predicate and i think that is kind of the background but i want to be much more focused, mr. henderson, on the question of children with disabilities. you mentioned the concern you have treating them differently as it relates to some of the assessment that we undertake. one data here, one piece of data and i just want to have you in the remaining time walk through your reasons is that we've got about 6 million students in the country with disabilities. educated in public schools, most of whom spend their day learning alongside other students. according to the national center for education statistics, 90% 90% of students with disabilities do not have intellectual or cognitive disabilities that would limit them. so you're talking about 10% of

children with disabilities are in the much more severe category. mr. hen doorderson, what's your basic concern about where we are now and where we could be if the draft that is on the table would be enacted. >> senator casey thank you for your question and thank you for putting it in the broader context of the totality of circumstances, that students of disabilities will face in states that are making policy choices about where to make investments. so let me say, as senator bennett said it pays big dividends but states often don't require that. you also recognize that while there may be a cap on ensuring that only the students with the most severe cognitive disabilities are classified as such schools now will use various methods to allow more students to be classified as having disabilities for purposes

of avoiding the kind of rigorous adherence to standards that we would like. 6.4 million kids with disabilities in the country. what we have found, those living in poverty would have a huge problem. well, what we have found from the draft that we have seen -- and by the way, i am drawing this from a council representing persons with disabilities within the leadership conference. and they have really stressed the importance of trying to adhere to standards because what they have seen is that students with disabilities are often classified as proficient not having met the -- because they have somehow met the alternative achievement standard and have somehow been exempted from the more rigorous mainstream standard that would be required under existing law. that, for us is a huge problem.

and when you add to the fact that states now because of budgets are choosing not to invest in public education in the same way, quite frankly, that's what happened in pennsylvania over the last several years. creating huge problems, particularly for kids with disabilities. so our view is that states will choose to really make cuts where the voices of the advocacy community are perhaps the weakest. and unfortunately that sometimes applies to our students with disabilities. they are often in poverty themselves and they lack the kind of strong advocacy network, aside from the organizations i've identified here. that can really represent their interest and one last point. >> we're over our time. >> i'm sorry. the new american foundation looked at 16 states -- >> we're running short. but go. conclude. go ahead. >> i will.

thank you. i appreciate it. and 4400 schools that have been previously established for purposes of intervention were largely ignored under those states once the waivers had been given. so that is the reality of what we face. thank you, sir. >> thank you, mr. henderson and senator casey. senator whitehouse. >> thank you, chairman. my experience with the education universe is that there are really two worlds in it. one is a world of contractors and consultants and academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal state and local level. and the other is a world of principleeipals and classroom teachers who are actually providing education to students. and what i'm hearing from my principals and teacher's world

is that the footprint of that first world has become way too big in their lives. to the point where it's inhibiting their ability to actually do the jobs that they're entrusted to do. so i understand that there are lots of concerns and i share those concerns about making sure that the benefit of education is spread evenly across the children of this country and that people who don't have a voice don't also lose out on their chance to join the ranks of economic success where they will have more of a voice. but i don't -- i went through the park tests a week ago. for mathematics and for something that they call english language arts. which is off to a pretty bad start if that's what you have to call it. and i wasn't all that impressed with those questions and with those tests.

i didn't see tests, questions that couldn't have been integrated in a regular test that couldn't have been given by regular teachers in the course of teaching and assessing their students. to me, it's pretty clear that these tests are designed to test the school and not the student. in rhode island, the timing of the reporting of the results that the contractor assumed was such that the teacher in the coming year wouldn't even have the information. so clearly the next year's teacher was not the focus of this effort. the scheduling and the preparation for this is important because kids are not stupid and they know the difference between the test that's going to affect their grade and the test that's not going to affect their grade. so the school has to go through huge heroic efforts and interested to get them prepared for a test that they know they're not personally graded on or responsible for the outcome of. and then kids have scheduling

problems. they can't all get them in at once. many schools in rhode island simply don't have the electronic bandwidth for the class to take the test at once. it's not one test it's three tests and you can't teach the kids while the other kids are in the test. and we have got to solve this problem. and it is an efficiency problem. it is a problem of simply being smart, about gathering information. but i'm really concerned about this. and i'm saying this at this point to invite conversation with my colleagues as we go forward. the super structure of education supervision i'm not sure passes the test of being worth all the expense and all the trouble. and it's very discouraging to teachers in rhode island who talk to me. they hear about the race to the top money that comes to the state and the state gets a big grant. everybody has a press conference and it's like the rain falling over the desert where the rain comes pouring out of the clouds

but by the time you're actually at the desert floor, not a rain drop falls. it's all been absorbed in between. i have never had a teacher say to me boy, race to the top gave me what i need in terms of books or a white board, things i can use to teach the kids. so i think we've got to be very careful about distinguishing the importance of the purpose of some of this oversight and not allow the importance of the purpose to allow the oversight to be conducted in such an inefficient wasteful clumsy way for people we really trust with students. people in the classroom with them have been looking back at us and saying stop, help. i can't deal with this. you are inhibiting my ability to teach. and i think that damage in the classroom falls just as hard on the communities that are having difficulty getting their fair share of education as it does anywhere else. i really think we need to

grapple with that in this committee, and i have basically used all of my time with that set of remarks. but that was less the manner of a question than an invitation to my colleagues to continue this discussion and to let you know what i think is important as we go forward. you have two seconds -- no, you don't. go on. >> well, thank you, senator whitehouse and invitation accepted. i think we need to have lots of discussions about this. and not all these discussions i'm discovering as i talk, fall down in predictable ways. that was very helpful. thank you. now, our wrap-up senator murphy. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you very much for convening a really well-balanced and thoughtful hearing. i got a chance to read almost after your testimony that wasn't here in person. i came to congress as a vocal

opponent and critic of no child left behind. for a lot of the reasons that senator whitehouse enunciated, but also because, now i come from a family of educators and my mother was a wonderful elementary school teacher and then an english as a second language teacher. she walked away from teaching because she spent a lot more time on bureaucracy and a lot less time on teaching. and that's not what she went into it for. but one of the first meetings i had when i got here as a freshman member of congress who was with the children's defense fund and they came in because they had heard that i had been a real active critic of no child left behind. and they wanted to just present the case for me as to what was happening in other parts of the country. maybe not connecticut prior to no child left behind with respect to children with disabilities, to explain to me that there were places in which

because largely of the cost pressures on local school districts to provide a full compliment of educational services with disabilities that many of them were spending part of their week with the janitor in technical education. and were being largely ignored. while they had critiques of the lies i did their point was it's important for us not to abandon the gains that we've made with respect to children with learning disabilities who had maybe in some places not been getting a fair shot before. so i wanted to just build on the questions that senator casey raised and maybe i'll direct it to my friend dr. west, full disclosure. we were college classmates, and i'm pleased that he's here today. senator casey referenced some data suggesting the enormity of

students with disabilities who are in special education programs who do have the ability to take these tests, and yet the fear is that if you move to alternative assessments and give school districts the ability to move broad swaths of children with learning disabilities out from under the test, you lose the pressure to provide the appropriate education but also as you cautioned more generally in your comments, lose the ability for parents of children with disabilities to really figure out where their children are going to succeed and where they aren't. even if you preserve annual statewide testing to give broad measurements for schools with parents, if you exempt big portions of children who have learning disabilities, those parents aren't helped by the overall assessments of the school. so i'd love to hear what the data shows about what happens when we require that the

majority of children except for those with severe cognitive disabilities take the test and what that might mean for accountability moving forward. >> so as senator casey mentioned, the vast majority of students with disabilities do not have sblul disabilities. they should be able to reach the same standards with the modifications to the assessments their given. the second point i would make is that there has to be some form of a cap on the number of students that are allowed to take those alternative assessments. i'm not sure the 1% cap that was in the no child left behind legislation was cover. but one thing we know from study of accountability and our schools respond to them more generally is that some schools will find a way to game the system. so they might reclassify students as being special education if that exe