Category: Assessment

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

Posted on | by Sam

Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

Positively Deviant School Reform?

Posted on | by Sam

If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what would you do?

I ask because this was precisely the challenge Save the Children was faced with, in Vietnam, in the early 1990s. And the way they succeeded has great relevance for those of us who continue to struggle with other intractable problems (like, say, comprehensive school reform).

In 1990, two-thirds of Vietnamese children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. A string of typhoons had decimated the country’s central food staple: rice. Consequently, traditional supplemental feeding programs offered little more than a temporary solution.

Under these circumstances, Save the Children (STC) was asked to help Vietnam solve its widening problem of child malnutrition – and told that the solution could not come from more food, more money, or more resources of any kind: the people were going to have to solve the problem themselves. And if STC couldn’t help them figure out how in six months, its visa would not be renewed.

In response to these desperate circumstances, STC decided the first thing they should do was see if any of the country’s poorest families had children who weren’t malnourished; surely, if there were, something valuable could be learned from them. As STC’s Jerry Sternin explains, “Aid workers visited households, asked questions, and, most importantly, observed how mothers and other family members fed and cared for their well-nourished kids.” And as it turned out, “in every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet, along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.”

Other atypical habits emerged. Most families fed their young children twice a day – in the morning, before they left to work in rice fields, and in the afternoon, after they returned. But because small children have small stomachs, they could only eat so much of the available rice at each sitting. By contrast, the outlier parents had instructed an adult in the house (usually a grandparent or older sibling) to feed their children regularly – as much as five times a day. As a result, even though every family had the same amount of rice, some children were getting twice as many calories as their friends and neighbors.

Armed with these insights, STC worked to help the parents of the malnourished children change their behavior. Within weeks, the early morning trip to the rice paddy with a small net and empty tin can – for retrieving the shrimp, crabs and greens – had become routine. And by the time STC’s six months were up, more than 40% of the children who participated in the program were rehabilitated; another 20% moved from severe malnutrition to moderate malnutrition; and Save the Children received another six-month visa.

What explains STC’s remarkable success? A strategy called Positive Deviance (PD) – or the idea that in every community, there are already individuals and/or groups behaving in a way that will engender better solutions to community-wide problems.

As the Positive Deviance Institute explains, the PD approach “is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.” And as Sternin suggests, “because PD is based on the successful behaviors of individuals and groups within the socio-cultural context of each program community, it is always, by definition, culturally appropriate. It is very much an ‘approach’ not a ‘model.’”

As someone who cares deeply about American public education, I believe the PD approach could yield great returns for our ongoing reform efforts – but only if we become clear on what it is that constitutes “positive deviance.”

Currently, we celebrate the teachers or schools that demonstrate unusual gains in reading and math scores. But that’s like trying to solve malnutrition by focusing on whether children eat out of bowls or on a plate; it’s related to the goal, but only indirectly.

What, then, is the central goal of American school reform? I would suggest it’s creating a system that is capable of supporting the development and growth – cognitively, socially, emotionally, and ethically – of every child. And if that is our goal (or close to it), then our examples of positive deviance must come from schools and communities that, despite limited resources, are helping children to holistically develop and grow.

That means no private school examples will suffice – and it means no highly unique, highly expensive models like Harlem Children’s Zone. It probably also needs to mean only public schools that do not screen for certain types of students – so, no magnets, either. We’re looking for places that are positively deviant even though they have the same resources as the rest of us.

So who fits the bill? For districts that are reorienting themselves around the personalized needs of every student, we might want to spend more time looking at what RSU2 is doing in Maine, or what superintendent Pam Moran has helped engineer in Albemarle County, Virginia. For individual schools that are attuned to the holistic developmental needs of kids, we can look to Malcolm Price Lab School in Iowa, or The Project School in Indiana. And for networks that help their members focus on the right combination of inputs and outcomes for kids, we should study Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, and James Comer’s School Development Program.

There are, in other words, lots of examples of positive deviance in our current system – and lots of places that are refusing to be limited by the current myopic definition of what constitutes “success.” And while none of these places are perfect, together, their examples of positive deviance just might add up to the perfect plan for American public education going forward.

What other examples are you aware of — and what is the positive deviance your example brings to light?

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

How Should We Evaluate Our Preschools?

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine, for a second, that you are in charge of more than $600 million in taxpayer money. You live in a city that has made deep investments in early education, and that aspires to provide universal preschool by 2014. You have a thriving network of public charter schools, and you want to help parents make more informed choices about where they send their children.

What would you do?

Continue reading . . .

Is It The Tests or the Stakes?

Posted on | by Sam

As DC grapples with whether or not to adopt an accountability framework that would assign between 60-80% of a charter preschool’s overall rank to its students’ reading and math scores, it’s worth asking: What’s at the root of the problem here — the tests, or the stakes attached to those tests?

When it comes to the debate over the Early Childhood Framework (which you can access here — just click “Public Hearing” in the left column and then click “Early Childhood PMF”), I would suggest it is overwhelmingly the latter.

Here’s the thing: just about every early childhood program worth its salt is already assessing children in a variety of ways, including, and not limited to, reading and math. Usually, these assessments are administered in a 1-on-1 format, and if a teacher does his or her job skillfully, the child won’t even register that it’s a “test.” So the Public Charter School Board is correct when it says that testing children in these subjects is not new.

What their explanation glosses over is the impact children, educators and parents can expect once these assessments have high-stakes attached to them. Rankings matter to all schools, but they are particularly important to charter schools, which are always in the midst of raising money, searching for a permanent facility, and recruiting families. Here in DC, “Tier 1” status is a gateway to better fundraising, preferential treatment when it comes to facilities, and longer waiting lists.

The problem with the PCSB’s proposal, therefore, has less to do with requiring schools to choose from a common pool of math and reading assessments (indeed, the list boasts more than thirty options to choose from, many of which were submitted by the charters themselves), and more to do with attaching a disproportionate weight to reading and math. This immediately transforms those assessments from diagnostic to accountability tools. It is guaranteed to modify the behavior and strategic planning of the schools. And it perpetuates the shell game of American public education, in which we use partial information to pronounce complete judgment on whether a given reform effort is working or not. (And, more importantly, in which we allow ourselves to assign credit or blame in ways that correspond to a political timetable.)

In reality, as both common sense and research would tell you, it’s not that simple. “True standards of intellect do not lend themselves wholly to quickly collected, precise, standard measurement,” wrote Ted Sizer in his classic book, Horace’s Compromise. “We need to devise clusters of instruments to probe our students’ ability to think resourcefully about important things. Indeed, we need time to reflect deeply on what we mean by ‘think resourcefully’ and what we feel are the most ‘important things.’”

In his 2009 book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz makes a similar point. “Careful testing can give us tremendously valuable information about student achievement that we would otherwise lack,” he says. The question is how well we understand what standardized tests can, and cannot, tell us about American schools. “There is no optimal design,” he asserts. “Rather, designing a testing program is an exercise in trade-offs and compromise – and a judgment about which compromise is best.

Systems that overvalue one set of test scores fail to heed this advice, but they also fail to highlight a sufficiently clear picture of what is actually happening in a school. “Certainly, low scores are a sign that something is amiss,” Koretz says. “But the low scores themselves don’t tell why achievement is low and are usually insufficient to tell us where instruction is good or bad, just as a fever by itself is insufficient to reveal what illness a child has. Disappointing scores can mask good instruction, and high scores can hide problems that need to be addressed.”

So let’s vigorously debate ideas like the PCSB framework, and when we do so, let’s follow the lead of experts like Lydia Carlis, the chief of Research and Innovation for the AppleTree network of preschools. “The ongoing conversation will be so useful to all children if we focus on both/and rather than either/or when discussing teaching and (developmentally appropriate) assessments of academics and SEL in early childhood, ” she says. “The early childhood interventions that have been evaluated longitudinally and shown effective demonstrate that low-income children at risk for school failure need early access to high quality, evidence based academic and social supports. Social emotional skills are both necessary and insufficient for closing the academic achievement gap. Children who begin demonstrating cognitive gaps as early as nine months need skill and concept development on academic content and strategic support for social emotional learning. And clearly, all children will benefit from a high quality, balanced instructional program.

Works for me. PCSB, are you listening?

 

(Extra)Ordinary People

Posted on | by Sam

There’s an anecdote the Calhoun School’s Steve Nelson likes to share when he speaks to teachers and parents about the purpose of education. “We should think of our children as wildflower seeds in an unmarked package,” he says. “We can’t know what will emerge. All we can do is plant them in fertile soil, give them plenty of water and sunlight, and wait patiently to see the uniqueness of their beauty.”

At a time when too many students are still being planted in highly cultivated gardens – trimmed and pruned to resemble each other closely – it is incumbent upon all of us to stand on the side of the unmarked package. And at a time when we stray further and further from our democratic roots – from Chicago to DC – it is essential we heed the words of Mission Hill founder Deborah Meier, who reminds us that “democracy rests on having respect for the judgment of ordinary people.”

These two visions – of a school filled with unmarked seeds, and a democracy fueled by ordinary citizens – come together in the tenth and final chapter of A Year at Mission Hill. We see a montage of children in various states of joy. We hear teachers sing the words of poet Kahlil Gibran at their school’s graduation ceremony (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”). And we watch principal Ayla Gavins tell her staff she will refuse to administer new testing requirements under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

As Mission Hill plans for the challenges of a new school year, we should pay attention to the principles its principal is willing to risk her career to protect: Trust and transparency. Experience. Variation. Autonomy. And, as she puts it, “celebrating the humanness in all of us, and trying to build on human potential and not stifle it.”

Some will have watched this series and concluded that schools like Mission Hill are little more than inspiring one-offs, with a singular vision of schooling that can never be scaled. Yet there are already hundreds of schools – from the Expeditionary Learning network to the New York Performance Standards Consortium – that assess their students similarly (and a handful of states that are following suit). There are already thousands of teachers with the ability, given the right supports and surroundings, to be just as masterful as the ones we’ve observed at Mission Hill. And there are already streamlined structures in place, from the pilot school model in Boston to the statewide funding system in Vermont, that are empowering public schools to be more innovative, inclusive, and effective.

To be fair, it makes sense that people are searching for the best way to scale the ideas in a school like Mission Hill. After all, the more children that can have experiences like the ones we’ve watched over the course of this series, the better off our society will be. But the best way to spread ideas in a democracy is not by scaling up, like McDonald’s, buy by scaling across, like farmers markets. In the first example, the goal is to make everything so uniform that walking into any store anywhere in the world should feel – and taste – exactly the same. In the second, the goal is to create a forum for people to access what will make them healthier, and to come together in a spirit of community. As a result, every farmers market shares certain common design principles. And each one also demonstrates the myriad variations in how those principles can get applied.

A Year at Mission Hill is a visual testament to the pedagogical power of the second approach. It’s a place that treats the learning process the same way a skilled gardener would nurture a package of wildflowers: by preparing the soil, planting the seeds, and waiting for the unique beauty to emerge. And it’s a place that reminds us that when you invest deeply in the capacity of ordinary adults to do their jobs well, they are capable of extraordinary things.

“The freedom of teachers to make decisions about their classrooms and their lives is essential, “ Meier adds. “The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment – and you can’t do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs.”

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

In American Schools, What is Quality Work?

Posted on | by Sam

For years now, I’ve been asking everybody I meet the same question: “When and where were you when you learned best?”

I’ve asked this question because so many of our national school reform efforts are not about learning at all; they’re about achievement, which has come to mean something quite apart from the stories people tell when you ask them to recall one of the most powerful experiences of their lives.

And here’s the thing: if you stitch everyone’s stories together, a clear pattern emerges. I know because I did this (see for yourself). And what emerged was that we all need, to differing degrees, learning opportunities that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential.

I was reminded of that work – and of the importance of relevance – when watching Chapter 8 in the 10-part video series about Mission Hill, a public elementary and middle school in Boston.  It begins with a young boy holding an alligator. It continues with young children organizing and opening a bakery in their classroom. And it concludes with a group of teenagers eagerly ripping open a package that contains fresh copies of the book they have all worked to co-create.

What we learn is that the children have been asked to imagine a possible future profession for themselves, and to interview someone who does that work so they can better understand if it might really be for them. One child envisions a life as an animal tamer. Another thinks he might become a martial artist. And two other students have each set their eyes on becoming the future Mayor of Boston.

“It’s so important that the ideas come from the kids,” says teacher Kathy Klunis-D’Andrea, “and that they get to see them actualized. There’s so much that they can learn about those real-life experiences that make true connections that they don’t forget. They are locked into learning.”

Of course, what we see at Mission Hill is more than just relevant projects. There’s a culture in place, an ethic, that demands the best of its teachers and students. As longtime educator Ron Berger puts it in his wonderful book An Ethic of Excellence, “Weighing yourself constantly doesn’t make you lighter and testing children constantly doesn’t make them smarter. The only way to really lose weight and keep it off, it seems, is to establish a new ethic – exercise more and eat more sensibly. It’s a long-term commitment. It’s a way of life.

“I have a hard time thinking about a quick fix for education,” Berger continues, “because I don’t think education is broken. Some schools are very good; some are not. Those that are good have an ethic, a culture, which supports and compels students to try and to succeed. Those schools that are not need a lot more than new tests and new mandates. They need to build a new culture and a new ethic.”

To build a new ethic at a school, of course, one must begin somewhere. Berger believes student work is the logical place to start. “Work of excellence is transformational,” he writes. “Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. We can’t first build the students’ self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow.”

This ethic of excellence Berger describes is at the center of schools like Mission Hill. It’s also present in organizations like Expeditionary Learning, a national network of more than 150 schools. And that network isn’t only filled with established, stable schools; it’s expanding to include the places where a school-wide ethic of excellence is being cultivated for the very first time.

One such place is the Mundo Verde Public Charter School in Washington, DC. Now in its second year, Mundo Verde decided to document one of its expeditions – typically, multiweek explorations of a topic that involves not just original research, but also a culminating project that is presented to the public – in its first year of operation. The film of that experience, La Expediçion, highlights the same qualities we see at work in Mission Hill – and the same core characteristics we see in our own personal learning memories.

As you watch both videos, consider the quality of the work Mission Hill’s 8th graders and Mundo Verde’s Kindergartners are able to produce. In schools like these, there’s no doubt about what matters most – quality work. And if there was any doubt about why that was the right goal to have, Mission Hill’s 8th graders clarified matters by the title they chose for their book: A Place for Me In The World.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

This is Your Brain on Test Scores

Posted on | by Sam

There are two seemingly unrelated columns in today’s Opinion page of the New York Times that provide a crisp summary of where we stand in our current thinking about school reform — and where we need to go.

The first is a piece about charter schools in New York City, in which the editors reference “a national study finding that only 17 percent of charter schools offered students a better education, as measured by test scores, and that an astounding 37 percent offered a worse one.”

This is not the first time the Times has uncritically conflated something as comprehensive as “a better education” with something as singular as student reading and math scores. I imagine it won’t be the last. But it is, thankfully, a funhouse-mirror brand of “business thinking” that is on its death bed. Indeed, it hasn’t characterized actual business thinking for decades — ever since Robert Kaplan’s notion of the balanced scorecard first demonstrated the danger of focusing too narrowly on net income as a metric of overall success.

As I have said repeatedly, reading and math scores are valuable — and overvalued. Even KIPP, the poster child for exponential test score growth in high-poverty environments, recognized this when, a year ago, it shared the results of its own study that showed just a 33% college completion rate for its graduates. Since that time, as Paul Tough reports in his new book, KIPP has rightfully sought to round out its own portrait of a successful graduate by identifying a set of actual skills and habits its young people can use to successfully navigate the awaiting worlds of college, career and citizenship.

Ironically, neuroscientist David Eagleman calls for a similarly comprehensive vision on the same Op-Ed page. Writing about President Obama’s recent decision to invest in a multiyear effort to map the human brain, Eagleman makes a series of statements the Times editors would be wise to apply to their own thinking about school reform. “You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your smartphone and expect the phone to function,” he writes. “Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously.”

What excites Eagleman is the potential to understand the brain as a system, and not just as a series of isolated parts. “While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems,” he writes, “we have yet to understand how to remedy them.”

The same can be said for our efforts to diagnose which school provides the “better education.” Now we just need to courage to admit it.

Has Testing Reached A Tipping Point?

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Has Testing Reached A Tipping Point?

(This article also appeared on the SmartBlog on Education.)

It wasn’t that long ago that suggesting America’s schools had become test-obsessed was a lonely endeavor.  Although organizations like FairTest and campaigns like Time Out From Testinghave been decrying the flawed logic behind high-stakes tests for years, the reality is that for the past decade, many of us kept our complaints reserved for the privacy of the parking lot

People vented. Policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.

In 2008, however, the election of Barack Obama seemed to augur a new era. All along the campaign trail, the Illinois Senator suggested a clear understanding of the ways a single measure of success can distort an entire system and narrow the learning opportunities for children. Then he made history by becoming the nation’s 44th president – and unveiling a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.

Again, the people vented. But this time, policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance, leading many to wonder: Has a tipping point been reached? Are we witnessing the early signs of a sea change in how we think about the best ways to measure student learning and growth?

Consider three separate data points as evidence: Maryland, where the superintendent of the state’s largest district of schools has called for a three-year moratorium on standardized tests; Washington, where one school’s decision to boycott its state tests has spread to other schools and communities; and Texas, where a proposed Senate bill would significantly reduce the number of state standardized tests students must pass to graduate.

In all three places – and many more across the country – what’s changed is a growing willingness to publicly acknowledge what FairTest has argued for years: that tests do not align well with the latest research into how people learn; that they prevent adults from measuring higher-level thinking in children; and, most importantly, that there are better ways to evaluate student learning and growth.

The breadth of these mini-rebellions – from the Pacific Northwest to the Lone Star State – suggests that the unwillingness of the Obama administration to plot a new course for the country has awakened a latent frustration among educators, who are desperate to see systems that value more than incremental academic growth. As Montgomery County Superintendent Joshua Starr put it, policymakers need to “stop the insanity” of evaluating teachers via a formula that is based on “bad science.” Starr’s critique was echoed by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian. “We’ve been raising our voices about this deeply flawed test for a long time,” he said. But now that the district is using it for evaluations, “we’ve drawn our line in the sand.” And then there’s Texas education commissioner Robert Scott, who has decried the ways student testing had become a “perversion of its original intent,” and promised he would do whatever he could to “reel it back” in the future.

To be sure, the American test obsession still has a firm hold on our collective psyche, and with Common Core assessments around the corner, we’re a long ways off from the Finnish model – in which there are no national tests and all student assessments are devised and administered locally by teachers. But what seems equally clear is that a new sort of idea virus is gaining strength in education circles. And as Malcolm Gladwell explained in The Tipping Point, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. When we’re trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance.”

To convert their opponents from hostility to acceptance, educators will need to clarify more than what they’re against; they’ll also need to propose specific and realistic alternatives. Josh Starr is off to a good start: he proposes creating assessments for Common Core-aligned curriculum by crowdsourcing their development and letting teachers design them – rather than the private companies. And the good news is there are other big ideas out there, and other places where effective alternatives to standardized testing already exist.

Perhaps, then, 2013 will finally be the year that educators end a decade of test obsession – and bring the noise.