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A Fair Process  By Cara Cookson I didn't really appreciate the Vermont standards and assessment system until I had graduated and could look back. I grew up in the small town of Cabot, Vermont, best known across state borders for the cheese it produces. Like most schools nationwide, standardized tests were a staple in my school of 250 students, and starting in first grade I dreaded them. The tests were boring and rather than complement or enhance class, they took time away. Whatever excitement lay in racing to "bubble in" our names with a fresh #2 pencil ended as the teacher read from the faded instruction manual. Unlike students in most other states, we also had to prepare math and English portfolios for assessment in 4th, 8th, and 10th grade. For math, that meant identifying and assembling several successful but representative math assignments. It also meant solving complex math problems from multiple approaches and then explaining, in an essay, how you came to the solution and its relevance to your other math work -- and the dreaded "real world." (We despised having to make "real world" connections in our problems because it took extra effort; once you solved the problem, you just wanted to be done with it.) An English/language arts portfolio involved writing a variety of pieces -- from personal narrative to writing responses used in other academic disciplines -- and using draft processes to polish them into finished works. The student submits a self-chosen "best piece," in addition to several others that reflect different types and styles of writing. In a letter to the portfolio's readers, the student discusses how she or he chose the portfolio pieces. Despite good intentions, my classmates and I scrambled to complete our portfolios as the last week of the semester approached, editing and organizing in colorful pocket folders the fruits of a year's worth of learning -- and eluding the threat of a lowered grade. Shoving them on the teacher's desk with a sigh, we dashed out the door for vacation while our portfolios began their official duty, "informing assessment" in the language of educators. Mysterious to me then but clearer now, it's a process with several steps. Vermont randomly chooses portfolios from every school in the state, and professionally trained teachers use "benchmarks" (other student examples that represent varying levels of achieving the state standards) to assess the portfolios individually. Months later every school receives its average score, representing the class as a whole, along with the state average. In high school, teachers grade each student's portfolio themselves and add the scores to a pot of numbers that together determine whether or not the student moves on to the next grade. Did I like the tedious, often stressful, task of putting together portfolios? Definitely not. When I look back on it now, though, I know it's a much fairer system of assessing student progress. The teacher doesn't just see what answer the student gets, or what the student wrote, but what thought process he or she used to get there. That's important, because school shouldn't be about learning facts, but learning how to learn and how to think for yourself. So along with encouraging state standards that guide teachers in building students' thinking skills -- standards that also recognize that the best learning experiences can lie in the community outside the classroom -- I encourage promotion requirements that incorporate a range of assessment tools, too. This way, every student has an opportunity to achieve based on their own way of learning and applying what they learn in a variety of ways. If I can prove what I know by writing an essay for a portfolio, that should carry as much weight as a multiple choice test -- it certainly uses multiple dimensions of my brain. The good education I received in my small Vermont town -- and the portfolios that were part of it -- has taught me many lessons. That it is wrong to make important decisions about a young person's life based on a single test counts among them. A bad day and a bad test should never turn an eighth grader, just beginning to gather his or her identity, into a certified failure. I am grateful I was part of a system that rejected such judgments.
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