Clearing Away the Bad Vibes About Testing.

Several years ago, the principal of my children's elementary school in Montgomery County, Md., addressed our monthly PTA meeting about the state's new assessment program, then finishing its first official year of statewide use.

While the principal remained diplomatic in discussing the state's new performance assessment for gauging school and school district quality, she clearly was uncomfortable with explaining the less-than-satisfactory showing of the school's test-takers on the first administration. Maryland's School Performance Assessment Program differed markedly from anything preceding it in its emphasis on applied knowledge and critical thinking about real-world problems--qualities she and the teaching staff hadn't fully appreciated.

As a parent, I was left with little information on which to base an informed opinion, though it would have been easy to rush to ill judgment of the state's new testing program based on the bad vibes in the air.

Clearly, the state education agency could have worked more closely with those at the school level to inform them of the test's criterion-referenced tasks and how best to prepare students, while the school, in turn, should have tried harder at explaining the novelties of a rigorous performance assessment to all parents.

The importance of communicating with parents and public about new forms of testing serves as the essential message in this month's issue of The School Administrator.

Notably, Kathryn Alvestad, who oversees student testing in one of Maryland's larger school systems, describes in her article the strategies she and her colleagues used to keep the community properly informed of the pending changes in the end-of-year testing, which she discovered weren't always popular.

We hope our readers will find these accounts useful and timely. You might be well-advised to remember that, as Alvestad plainly puts it, "Every new initiative, no matter how seemingly small and insignificant, has its detractors."

Jay P. Goldman