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Performance Standards and Assessments Criteria in English-Language Arts

In February 1997, the California Education Round Table (CERT) published Standards in Mathematics and English for California High School Graduates, a document that emerged from an increasing concern that high school graduates were not adequately prepared to enter the work force or succeed in college. The English Standards Task Force, including representatives from high schools, colleges, and universities, as well as business and community leaders and parents, met to develop content standards in six major topic areas: Reading; Writing; Grammar, Conventions, and Usage; Speaking and Listening; Literature; and Using Information. English*Language Arts content standards are unique in that they were developed for California schools by representatives of the public schools and postsecondary communities, together with community and business members.

Content standards, however, become meaningful only when educators and community members address two essential questions:

(1) How good is good enough to meet college and workplace expectations? and
(2) How do educators and students know when the expectations are reached?

Beginning in March 1997, the CERT Task Force on Assessment of Student Mastery of High School Graduation Standards in English was formed and began the process of responding to those questions. The charge to the Assessment Task Force was to articulate performance levels to use as a basis for assessing student work and to develop criteria for evaluating current assessments or for developing new ones. In addition, the agreed-upon performance levels were applied to samples of student work to show the ways by which those specific writing samples met, or did not meet, the standards. Not all of the content standards are fully illustrated in this document, nor are all of the score points exemplified. It is anticipated that further documentation of this kind will be forthcoming as part of ongoing professional dialogues.

Throughout this process, the Task Force understood that the task of preparing students to meet these standards falls on teachers. Their primary goal was to make the document a practical resource tool for educators to use in helping all students understand the expectations with respect to meeting, exceeding and reaching the highest possible performance levels for each standard. The ultimate goal of CERT is to provide practical guidelines, criteria, and strategies for teachers and administrators.

How Do These Performance Standards Relate to Other Standards Initiatives?
The CERT performance standards were developed during a time of rapid change and competing purposes, both nationally and statewide. Federal legislation, the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), mandates the local adoption of standards of academic achievement in the areas of reading and mathematics that are "at least as rigorous as" the standards adopted by the state. When this effort was initiated by the Round Table members, California had not yet adopted State content standards in the language arts and the state had been without a statewide assessment system for several years.

In December 1997, the Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards submitted two sets of content standards, one each in language arts and mathematics, to the State Board of Education. The State Board modeled the Commission’s standards to join the State standards. That same Commission is now beginning a cycle of public hearings on draft content standards in history, social science and science. As of the completion of this document, the Commission had focused exclusively on content standards and is just beginning the development of performance standards.

During this same period, many school districts in California have been developing academic standards for their students. Some have been part of the Challenge District program developed in 1995 by Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin; others have been developing their own standards. These districts have been asked to demonstrate the ways in which their standards meet or exceed the State standards, or are "at least as rigorous as" the State standards with respect to four core criteria: breadth (the differences in content coverage among the standards); depth (the depth of learning and the performance capacities students must possess to meet the standards); pace of learning (differences in curriculum, grade level by grade level); and levels of performance (the level of difficulty that students must demonstrate to indicate that they have met the standards, and the quality of student performances that meet the standards). Since the CERT performance standards presented in this report are, across all four criteria, at least as rigorous as the State Board adopted standards for language arts, they should be useful guides for the development of local performance standards.

One concern often raised about these processes is the extent to which the new high school graduation standards align with college admissions requirements. The CERT content standards are aligned with the recommendations of postsecondary institutions for entrance into their Freshman English programs and with the State Board adopted language-arts standards. Because student performance levels will vary, meeting these standards will not assure automatic admission into college.

Although the use of the State Board adopted content standards is voluntary and still under the control of local school boards, the California Assessment Achievement Act of 1995 requires that an assessment system based on these standards be established to measure the performance of all public school students in grades 4, 5, 8, and 10. The Assessment of Applied Academic Skills, designed to provide a statewide report of school-level results, will indicate the extent to which students in those grades perform compared against the State standards. That assessment will be available in the spring of 1999 and will provide results by school, district, county, and statewide (but not for individual students).

In the absence of a statewide testing system, Governor Wilson proposed a new standardized basic skills test, now referred to as the Stanford Achievement Test (9th edition). As part of the Standardized Testing and Reporting Program (STAR), that test is being administered to all students in grades 2 through 11, even though its alignment with the State’s content standards has been a matter of controversy. While not intended to replace the assessment system cited above, it will provide information about the extent to which students are performing, compared to one another, in terms of meeting minimal academic competencies.

Once the new assessment system is in place, measures of accountability likely will be enforced to ensure that educators and students take the statewide tests seriously and that long-term improvements in student achievement occur. The Rewards and Interventions Advisory Committee, convened by Superintendent Delaine Eastin in 1997, proposed seven interrelated recommendations for developing a plan that would establish incentives for the improvement of pupil academic achievement. If legislatively mandated, the interventions program would begin in the 1999-2000 school year.

How Do These Performance Standards Accommodate All of Our Student Populations?
This question was addressed by the Task Force.* Although our underlying assumption is that a statewide test will give students opportunities to demonstrate the proficiency needed to begin a career or pursue further education, the Task Force realized that many English Language Development (ELD) students may have difficulty meeting the standards during their high school careers. This serious problem requires that and all of us -- parents, teachers, district administrators, local school boards, and state legislators -- must share responsibility for ensuring that all California’s children are adequately prepared to meet the standards.

A large proportion of California’s students learn English as their second language. These students can and do enter high school at any point during the four-year program. Some students arrive knowing no English, while others are highly proficient. Those students entering with little or no English language background can acquire conversational skills in two or three years. However, a much longer period of time is required for them to gain the English reading and writing skills to meet the standards. Generally accepted linguistic research indicates that acquisition of English as a second language, particularly academic reading, writing, and speaking skills, requires seven to ten years under the best learning conditions. A more complete discussion of the stages of second-language acquisition is presented in California Pathways (available at www.CATESOL.org).

In order to allow enough time for students who do not meet the standards to improve their skills, assessment should take place in the fall semester of the eleventh grade. In addition to instruction especially designed for ELD students, which discussed below, districts must provide options including reading courses, intensive tutoring, special classes, summer school, alternative education, continuing education, and adult education, for other students whose performance evidences inadequate progress toward meeting the standards. Districts should use multiple assessments, including instruments and tools such as those suggested in this document.

Students who can read and write in their first language are more likely to learn quickly to read and write effectively in English. Information about first language literacy, gathered early in the student’s education, will assist in identifying the most effective language-arts classes for these students. ELD students should be evaluated with appropriate and valid assessments that align with the standards and take into account the stages of second language acquisition. Results of these tests should identify appropriate course work to assist students to meet the standards. For ELD students to meet the standards as effectively and efficiently as possible, their teachers must be trained in teaching English as a second language. In school districts with large numbers of ELD students, teachers in all subject areas should meet the State competencies for teaching these students. Teacher education programs must ensure that future teachers are B-CLAD or CLAD credentialed. School districts and universities can cooperate to provide in-service training for experienced teachers whose credential programs did not include these competencies. Finally, the State must provide the resources necessary to meet the challenge of providing all students adequate opportunities to demonstrate proficiency in the standards.

What Will It Take to Make This Effort Succeed?
By establishing that English content standards are a priority for academic achievement across the curriculum, educators can provide the conditions by which students can meet them. The content of the standards should be taught throughout a student’s educational career and infused throughout the curriculum. Students should be expected to read widely and in depth and to write and speak for a variety of audiences and purposes in all subject areas as well as in English classes.

All stakeholders—from the local level to the state level—must be part of the equation designed to prepare students well:

• Elementary and middle schools need to prepare their students to meet high standards that are in alignment with the CERT standards so that their students can succeed in high school.
• Parents need to know, understand, and support the increased expectations required to attain a high school diploma. Parents and the community must be engaged to assist students to reach the new content standards. In addition, parents need to hold the schools accountable for providing the educational environment and resources that will result in student success.
• Students must be prepared to accept the responsibility for their own learning; they should realize that teachers, parents, and other students can support them in learning but cannot learn for them.
• Teachers should be given the time and resources to discuss and develop local assessment instruments and scoring rubrics. In addition, teachers should be provided with ongoing professional development opportunities which will enable them to employ instructional methods and strategies to support students in meeting the new levels of mastery and attainment. (Materials that are intended to assist teachers in this area have been included in this document.)
• Postsecondary educational institutions must collaborate within their regions -- within and between systems -- to support schools in these efforts.
• Public schools should collaborate with local businesses and industries to implement these standards as well as to inform students about the value of a high school diploma.
• Schools of education must strengthen their teacher-credentialing programs to include subject matter content and pedagogy to better enable all students to meet the content standards. Prospective teachers, especially those teaching English language learners, must be prepared to teach to these standards.
• The Governor and the Legislature must provide sufficient resources to support the implementation of the content standards at the local level.

There are many ways these goals can be accomplished:

(1) Conduct workshops for parents, teachers, and district administrators to familiarize them with the standards, the performance level descriptors, and the strategies that could be used to prepare students to meet them.
(2) Provide this standards document to the California Subject Matter Projects and other professional development providers on university campuses.
(3) Offer in-service workshops for teachers that would allow them to earn college credit.
(4) Provide workshops for statewide professional organizations.
(5) Provide workshops for credential candidates in the language-arts areas.

Providing the opportunities for students to succeed is the responsibility of the entire educational system. Every level of the educational enterprise must be prepared to increase significantly its commitment to the improvement of language-arts instruction if the attainment of the content standards by all students is to be realized.

How Can This Document Be Used and By Whom?
The California Education Round Table intends this document to be used by teachers and principals as they grapple with the need for clear academic standards and appropriate tools for assessing student performance.

In the pages that follow, educators are offered the following set of tools for their adaptation and use:

• a comparative alignment of CERT standards with The California Language Arts Content Standards (adopted by the State Board of Education);

• assessment criteria for evaluating that enable districts and schools to examine existing instruments and to guide them in developing their own instruments;

• assessment tools and activities for each standard, including texts that measure performances in that area, and lists of assessment instruments (examinations) currently available and widely used in California districts. To assist districts in adapting local assessments, samples of evaluation mechanisms (e.g., rubrics) are provided, in Appendix III;

• performance descriptors that establish and explain six levels from "severely limited" to "distinguished." These descriptors define for students, teachers, parents, and the university the level students must reach for high school mastery of English. In other words, performance levels answer the question, "How good is good enough?";

• annotated student writings that illustrate most content standards at different performance levels. These annotated examples show teachers and others the way that performance descriptors apply to actual pieces of student work;

• curriculum-specific resources for the Speaking and Listening Standards (Appendix I); and

• a list of approved instruments for measuring ELD and native-English-speaker skills (Appendix II).

The task force members expect that any assessment instrument used, whether locally developed or available statewide, will allow all students fair opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge, will not adversely portray any group of people, will not be offensive, and will respect the privacy rights of students.

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