Considering the Options

• In Event: Enhancing Parents' and Policy-Makers' Assessment Literacy: Considering the Options

Abstract

Presenter 2 Summary
The proposed symposium’s second presenter, as a staff member of an organization that provides technical assistance and federal advocacy support specifically to state-level education officials, will bring to the session a host of experience-informed insights regarding the kinds of, and levels of, assessment content most appropriate for those educational policymakers who make the nation’s schools function. Presenter 2 is also an active member of a recently established assessment-literacy task force whose mission it is to bring about meaningful increases of assessment understanding among the nation’s educators. Her recent experience in a highly related set of expositional activities, then, positions her to offer particularly pointed recommendations regarding how best to dispense suitable assessment-literacy components to the nation’s educational policymakers.
In her remarks, Presenter 2 intends to bring forward an ESSA guidance document that she and her assessment literacy task-force colleagues have developed, then highlight the ways that state education agencies can work collaboratively with education preparation providers and local school districts to support both policies and practices that render assessment literacy truly prominent in both teacher education and in professional development for teachers and administrators.
One clearly isolatable power that state education officials possess is their authority over the initial licensure of teachers and administrators—as well as the approval of the programs that prepare individuals for those licenses. Presenter 2 will contend that this considerable leverage carries with it a great responsibility. And, in this context, she will argue that states should employ their licensure authority to assure their state’s teachers and administrators are fully conversant with the significant concepts and procedures of educational assessment. She will lay out a set of tangible ways in which state education agencies can activate those policy levers when working in partnership with state educators to ensure that increased assessment literacy is suitably aligned with a continuum of teachers’ professional growth. All of these efforts, Presenter 2 will make clear, can be completely consonant with an ESSA framework.

Author

• Saroja Warner, Council of Chief State School Officers