Dive Brief:

• While U.S. Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos was recently criticized for her lack of familiarity with the proficiency versus growth debate, California’s CORE districts are moving ahead with efforts to measure both.
• CORE consortium Executive Director Rick Miller writes for EdSource that the group calls it the “power of two” and considers attention to both measures a way to acknowledge the progress schools are making — particularly with students who come to school well below grade level — and also hold systems accountable for overall proficiency.
• The CORE Districts’ growth model determines how much students grow in a particular school when compared to their “like peers,” who have similar test history, economic backgrounds, disability classifications, language ability and status as homeless or living in foster care — and the model adjusts for school concentrations of any high-risk characteristics.

Dive Insight:

One key question for determining accountability plans is how education and policy leaders want the results to be used. Proficiency scores do not give much information about what students need. If a test only measures their knowledge on grade-level content, but students came to school with a skill set far below grade-level, tests cannot answer many questions about how a school is currently serving them or should be. Measures that capture student growth can.

California is considering an accountability plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act that takes student growth into account when determining how well a school is doing. All states are in the process of developing accountability plans and many expect to submit them to the U.S. Department of Education this spring. Approving these plans will be one of the first major jobs of the next secretary of education.