A better approach to testing: teacher-friendly technology tools help educators track student performance on state exams, district benchmarks and classroom tests.

Mary Tribbey is in a race against time. As data coordinator for the Butte County Office of Education, Tribbey needs assessment solutions that empower educators to more quickly analyze test results and boost overall student achievement.

Tribbey, like thousands of her peers, must contend with the No Child Left Behind Act, which holds public schools accountable for student performance by calling for qualified teachers in all classrooms and setting new standards of achievement for all students to close the achievement **m Alas, schools that don't meet their progress targets for two consecutive years will be identified as "needing improvement," and after three failing years will be subject to a takeover or complete overhaul.

Admittedly, NCLB has flaws. Budget limitations, for instance, make it difficult to give all students and teachers the modern technology tools they need to succeed. Yet Tribbey and other educators are finding innovative prays to overcome such challenges. For the past two years, for instance, Tribbey's school districts have embraced and deployed a non-threatening, teacher-friendly assessment tool from the San Francisco based Edusoft.

Getting started

As a Web-based student assessment platform, Edusoft's online software helps superintendents, administrators and teachers track student performance across three kinds of tests: state exams, district benchmarks and classroom tests. It automatically grades tests and gives districts the data they need to improve classroom instruction and student performance. It also generates classroom level, standards based data, and analyzes individual students' skill levels to create individualized instruction.

Eager adopters include Hayfork Elementary, a K6 school in a small corner of Trinity County, Calif. In the late 1990s, the elementary school clotted to be identified as an underperforming school. The label gave the school critical Funds for improvement, inviting a new vision for the school and a sobering look at how Hayfork's programs and teaching practices were performing.

"We developed an action plan that changed the focus of our mission from just serving the community to meeting academic standards," recalls Rosalind Morris, a reading specialist at Hayfork.

As the school's team began to put its plan into place, weaknesses in existing programs began to emerge. They found reading inventories were very loose and informal, yet they were used to make sweeping decision on whether a child was placed at or below grade level. Morris, who had now stepped into a leadership role. saw the need for more targeted assessment tools. "We need multiple measures," she recalls saying. "We need to look at student growth and development from different angles."

In particular, Morris was seeking an assessment program that offered quick access to student performance results customized instructional tools and the ability to set benchmarks and measure meats to meet NCLB accountability requirements. As they began evaluating solutions, they found that a number of other schools in the district had already embraced and shown significant progress with Edusoft's technology, making it a natural choice for deployment at Hayfork Elementary.

Morris was impressed with how rapidly Edusoft compiled STALK data from the California Standardized Tests into comprehensible, meaningful reports what used to take her "hours and hours" was completed in minutes. Teachers can analyze the data then adjust their teaching styles to better address past test results and future goals.

That approach has paid big dividends. Hayfork Elementary's year-over-year reading results have improved more than 30 percent. "But our most phenomenal accomplishment by far has been with our kindergartners," Morris notes proudly. "Their literacy/reading proficiency rate is at 90 percent! We had never seen [such high scores] before."

Popular moves

Hayfork isn't alone. Multiple school districts across the country are evaluating or rolling out these tools to close the student achievement gap, including Butte County in Oroville, Calif.; Conejo Valley Unified School District in Thousand Oaks, Calif. (representing 22,000 students across 29 schools); Nacogdoches Independent School District in Nacogdoches, Texas (6,400 students, 10) schools); and more than 300 other school districts. Edusoft's secure software system, which includes key privacy features, currently stores more than 100 million student scores on more than 500,000 assessments.

The rush to automate and analyze student test results isn't surprising. "Schools are held accountable to raise the proficiency of kids ... at [all] levels," says Mike Manning, vice president of marketing at Edusoft. "This requires a significant change for schools with no added funding. As a result, schools and teachers need to be much more efficient. They need to offer targeted instruction, and they have to get their hands on accurate reporting very quickly."

State and federal mandates aside, some school districts are deploying the tools simply to cement their reputations for progressive education. Conejo Valley USD, for one, is already a high performing school district, and decided to use Edusoft in order to "reach more kids in more ways and let fewer kids fall through the cracks," says Mike Vollmert, the district's director of research, evaluation and assessment.

Big numbers, big challenges?

At first glance, rolling out software can be all intimidating task. The Butte County Office of Education's scope of operations spans 34,250 students, 15 districts, 92 schools and nearly 1,900 teachers. The school's software automation efforts needed to encompass diverse learners from all walks of life.

Rather than simply pushing students along from grade to grade, teachers and administrators are seeking effective change strategies for overall school improvement. The goal is to set high expectations for all students, rather than lowering the achievement bar so that underperforming students can squeak by.

After nearly a decade of dealing with several "cumbersome" student assessment systems and painstakingly transferring data by hand into charts, spreadsheets and graphs, Tribbey found a solution that met her needs.

"Other systems just weren't intuitive enough," laments Tribbey. "When I saw Edusoft, I thought, 'This is something where I could train a teacher, walk away and they'll use it, because it's as easy as booking a flight on an airline's Web site: read the screen, make a decision, click and move on ... that's it!'"

As for flexibility, Tribbey says the design is extremely adaptable and "enables us to look at data in a variety of different ways." She and her teachers use it to set benchmarks for classroom-level and district wide assessments and adopted materials, and (or aligning state tests. "We're constantly pushing the limits of the tools--but we're really good users, and that's our job."

Four speed bumps

Still, deploying a data-driven instruction model has four main challenges, according to Manning:

1. The hassle factor. In other words, the tool has to be easy and intuitive for teachers to use, and available across the Internet in a secure fashion.

2. Timeliness. In particular, automation tools have to compile student test results quickly, and they must provide deep analysis capabilities that allow teachers to draw conclusions rapidly.

3. Difficulty in correlating tests with actual classroom strategies. Very often, teachers see test results but it's hard to draw up a game plan to improve future results.

4. the quality of the assessments themselves. Make the wrong assessment, and you could wind up hurting future test results rather than improving them.

To overcome these challenges, many educators are implementing automated assessment tools at the central district level before pushing the software out to the classroom level. The Los Angeles Unified School District is a good example. Until last year, LAUSD had a process that took between six to 12 weeks to compile exam results. To further complicate matters, the data was trapped in information "silos," so drawing correlations between various classrooms, students, teachers and schools was impossible.

Looking for a better approach to testing, the district last year implemented Edusoft, which took only 10 weeks to deploy. Today, compiled test results reach instructors in a single day after tests are administered. The timely results allow the district to offer rapid, targeted remediation to individual students who need personalized attention. The district even overhauled its algebra curriculum because the tests showed that students weren't meeting proficiency requirements.

The new paper trail

Admittedly, online testing isn't feasible at many schools because it's impractical to deploy a broadband PC on every student desk. With such limitations in mind, Edusoft has worked with educators to develop a practical hybrid approach to testing, data collection and rapid data analysis.

The hybrid approach, known as Paper-to-Web, allows districts to take any paper-based assessment, create an answer sheet for it, print it out on plain paper, and have it scored automatically using an off-the-shelf office scanner. Once they are scored, the test results are automatically uploaded into an analysis tool.

"After that, you can use an intervention tool to create an individualized action plan," notes Manning. "You can use this approach for classroom assignments, too. By effectively gathering and analyzing the data, you can precisely diagnose what's going on in the classroom, and plot your next steps for student success."

Indeed, educators can create a profile for each student based on his or her needs. Teachers call put struggling students on "watch lists," intervene when students don't show signs of improvement, and design specific curricula to get those students back on track--long before the state comes knocking with concerns.

Clearly, savvy district leaders have found a way to close the achievement gap, as they strive to help all learners excel.

Franklin Smith, vice president of Urban Initiatives for Edusoft, is the former superintendent of schools for Washington, D.C.