House Leaders Debate Education Bill

Assessments are a critical component of any effort to measure student progress. They allow us to see what's working, and where there is room for improvement. But the quality of that information depends on the quality of the tests, and the challenge you have identified - ensuring the tests are viable and reliable - is one of the great opportunities to strengthen this landmark law.

Congress has provided states with $2 billion to design and implement effective assessments to measure student progress and allow comparisons among subgroups of students and across school districts and states. These comparisons provide vital information about student learning, helping teachers and schools focus help where it's needed most. Great strides have been made since NCLB was signed into law five years ago, but challenges remain. Through the upcoming reauthorization process, we hope to build upon the existing assessment framework to measure not just a snapshot of student achievement in a given year, but also to measure the growth of student achievement over time. States can do more to align their elementary and secondary education standards with those necessary to succeed in the workplace and to successfully enter an institution of higher education. Those standards must then be aligned with their state-wide assessments. We, then, must ensure their standards and assessments are reliable and rigorous.

I agree. I intend to propose several changes to address this. For example, we need to provide strong incentives to ensure that tests employ more comprehensive measures of student achievement beyond multiple choice questions. We also need to support the more extensive use of performance based measures - for example, science lab work - and multiple forms of assessment taken over time to ensure we get a better measure of what students know and can do.