It seems like everywhere you turn, someone is talking about the topic of school reform and how unfairly students, teachers, principals, districts, and states, are being judged based on standardized test. In New York City, they have developed an assessment called The New York Performance Standards Consortium, which is an alliance of 28 public schools in New York City, who have replaced standardized test with a (performance based test) that does not use English Language Arts in the Assessment. The assessment is used for graduation, accountability, and NCLB.

This small change, asking students to write essays and research papers, do science experiments, and create applied math problems rather than answer multiple choice questions, is having a big impact. The schools in the program have cut dropout rates in half, and the number of students who head to college after graduation has skyrocketed.

A recent consortium report, Education for the 21st Century, shows that performance-based assessment works well for the types of students that test-driven “reforms” are supposed to benefit but so often fail. The student population of the consortium’s 26 public schools located in New York City mirrors the city’s student body. They have nearly identical shares of blacks, Latinos, English language learners and students with disabilities. However, the consortium dropout rate is half that of New York City public schools. Graduation rates for all categories of students are higher than for the rest of New York City, while consortium rates for English Language Learners and students with disabilities are nearly double the city’s.

In 2011, 86% of African American and 90% of Latino male graduates of Consortium schools were accepted to college. National averages are only 37% and 43%, respectively. Ninety-three percent of consortium grads remain enrolled in four-year colleges after the first two years, compared with an average of 81% nationally. Yet, consortium students are far more likely to be low-income than the U.S. average. Consortium schools also have far lower rates of student suspension, but far higher rates of teacher retention, compared with other New York City schools, including charters (https://www.washingtonpost.com).

As I was plowing through a lot of information about performance-based assessments, I came across and interesting fact. In the United States, we test our students more than any other nation in the world and yet we rank anywhere from 26-30 with other nations in the world.

Finnish schools, which has been much acclaimed for having the top school systems in the world and well-trained teachers, use performance-based testing for all their students.