EdSource Symposium 2014: Testing Students and Evaluating Schools in the Age of the Common Core

Public education in California is undergoing radical reforms that change everything—from how students will be tested to the fundamental way schools are evaluated.

An EdSource symposium in Los Angeles will help the public make sense of the changes and how they’ll shape the future of education in the state.

The May 7 event, offered in partnership with the California State PTA, brings together experts in their fields to discuss the impact of reforms underway.

Panels will tackle the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the online tests associated with them that students are now piloting; a push to add measures of “college and career readiness” into the Academic Performance Index of school effectiveness; and new standards of school accountability driven by the state’s revamped education funding law, the Local Control Funding Formula.

Speakers at the symposium include school reform expert Michael Fullan, the former dean at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto who is credited with leading a whole scale transformation of the Ontario, Canada school system. He’ll keynote a session on what it will take to reform education in California.

Other sessions focus on a 2012 law requiring that the API incorporate measures of how well schools are preparing students to succeed in college and careers, a challenging task for the state committee working to define how to assess such skills. A top researcher on the subject, David Conley from the University of Oregon, will be joined by Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond on panels exploring the new focus on college and careers, and how to best evaluate schools using measures other than test scores alone.

“It’s a new day in California,” Darling-Hammond said. “This new accountability is substantially bottom up, rather than top down, and focused on multiple measures of success, rather than a single test score.” She said an “important new conversation has begun.”

The symposium is held in conjunction with the California State PTA’s annual convention, whose theme this year is “Connecting Families and Schools.”