Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the old model, there was an annual testing procedure. There was a lot of lag and delay as you’re pointing out. With the introduction of technology, is there ongoing testing? Is the annual state-level testing all online?

Rob Waldron: In a few places, it’s online. Mostly still, it is in print. Schools have moved online during the year for the benchmark to predict the test. It’s in flux right now. The adaptivity is much more efficient on that side. I gave you that example before on the area of circle where I’m capturing four or five pieces of data on an item instead of one.

You can get much closer to where a child is in 45 minutes and it’s hugely more precise than if you do in three hours. The next time you take it, you don’t start from scratch gain. You start from where you left off. The precision is huge and actually saves people time. We have every child in Miami, for example. They’ve eliminated, on average 250 minutes of testing per subject in a year.

That may not seem much but if you start thinking that that’s just ELA, you’re talking about another week of instruction. You get a whole week more of school by eliminating that stuff and then the power of this adaptive instruments gives you more information. You assess less but get more. That’s a big trend with adaptivity.

Sramana Mitra: What is it going to take to turn the state-level testing online as well, and maybe even the state-level testing becoming more integrated into the ongoing testing?

Rob Waldron: I think it’s getting there. I have been approached by many state commissioners. I really don’t want to do that. When you turn something like us to be, what I call, high-stakes, what happens is people start preparing for the test rather than using it to drive instruction. It doesn’t become a productivity tool. It becomes a Big Brother thing.

The other thing that we need to be conscious of is equity. One of the problems in using adaptive instruments is if I have special needs kids who can’t use a keyboard, is blind, or is deaf, I have to be different things. On the written SAT, what they do is allow you to take it for three hours where they’ll have an aid sit next to you to read you the question.

In our case, you’d have to have a filing cabinet of 6,000 items and pull out one item at a time because is adaptivity. We haven’t solved these problems for all kids. We’re working on that. For very good reasons, if you don’t have equity, you can’t make it high stakes. The testing companies using print have accommodated for these things. As an example, figuring out how to use adaptive instruments is an opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: Just listening to you, it strikes me that solving the testing problem on the state side of school board side is a different company almost. It takes a different way of thinking about it.

Rob Waldron: It’s a company I don’t want to be in. There are some people who do what I do and want to enter that side. I have seen, time and again, when we take some of the great work we do and tie it to instruction, change data in the classroom, and use it to lower teacher time. As soon as the district says, “I’m measuring your performance. You’re going to get punitive measures if you don’t do well in growth.” The entire thing changes and gets gamed. If you’re measuring growth, you end up wanting your kids to do poorly on the first one and do really well on the third instead of figuring out where they are.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates
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