"We're not out to get anybody," Pat Roschewski, Director of Statewide Assessment for Nebraska, told participants at the 2007 REWG meeting. "The external 'gotcha' mentality is not part of the way assessment works in Nebraska."   

The presentation at a lunchtime plenary described how the state's accountability system is based almost entirely on assessments developed at the local level by classroom teachers.    

The session proved to be a highlight-and a surprise-for many at REWG. It was met with a mix of incredulity that such an approach was possible and a fair amount of envy. Some asserted that they depend on the state to help force local school systems to adhere to state instructional standards. This is particularly the case in communities where powerful local interests do not support public education and do not want most public school students to achieve at high levels or have economic, political, and educational opportunities. But even with such reservations the strongest response from participants was one of hope-hope because a state has found a way to assess students that focuses on improving instruction, curriculum, and student learning rather than ranking or punishing schools.  

One participant responded: "This is interesting and it provided hope for teachers in the [rest of the country]." And several people commented that a mechanism that helped teachers use classroom assessment to improve instruction and curriculum would be useful even if their states did not adopt or support a more classroom-centered accountability system. 

Roschewski was joined in the presentation by Tarina Cox and Lynne Klemke. Cox is Science Lead Teacher for the Omaha Public Schools, and Klemke is aAssessment Coordinator for a cluster of small rural schools.  Because Nebraska's system is centered on classrooms-and the students and teachers who work in them-rather than on externally imposed standardized testing, the STARS program must be flexible enough to work in small, rural districts as well as large urban ones.

Unlike most states, Nebraska does not rely on a single measure to determine student proficiency. It does not require all students to take the same test-with the exception of a statewide writing test. And it does not rank schools.

Nebraska does set state curriculum standards-but local districts are free to establish their own, as long as the district's standards meet or exceed state standards. Local districts are responsible for developing and aligning local curriculum with standards.

Nebraska also requires all districts to set student learning targets based on the standards. Teachers are required to select and/or create and administer multiple assessments that accurately measure whether students are meeting those targets. They use multiple performance assessments as well as more traditional measures, and they write rubrics to guide the assessments. Then teachers use what they learn from the assessments to adjust curriculum and instruction.

Districts must explain their assessment systems to the Nebraska Department of Education and report in disaggregated formats how many students are meeting targets. Schools are required to establish new school improvement goals based on the data they collect through the assessment system.

There is another important requirement: Districts must submit reliability data on their assessments, proving the consistency of their measurements regardless of group size.

"We know how to do reliability with just one student," Roschewski notes--an important breakthrough in the statistics of student assessment and one that is especially important for rural districts, where there may be only a few students in any grade or disaggregated group. 

The Nebraska presenters explained that as part of their report, schools must provide disaggregated data from their local assessments; results of the statewide writing assessment; and results of one of five norm-referenced tests (districts can choose among five state-approved tests).

All of this provides plenty of information on every school, available to the public. The state does not rank schools based on the information, however. Because the STARS system is intended to improve student learning and strengthen teaching and curriculum, STARS forms the cornerstone of a statewide school improvement program.

For many REWG participants, the presentation about STARS was their first exposure to an assessment and accountability system that does not involve high stakes testing with potential punishments for teachers, students, or schools.

Several REWG participants had questions about how teachers learned to develop and use this type of assessment.

Klemke shared how she got involved with the assessment system when it was first introduced.  Teachers in several one- and two-teacher schools that were located near each other met over the summer to begin developing their STARS classroom assessments. They studied assessment, worked on curriculum, and began to develop specific assessment measures for the standards.

Now those teachers coordinate professional development and meet once a month to review data and adjust instruction accordingly. She told the group, "Lincoln [the state capital] doesn't tell us what our system will look like, we build it ourselves."

Cox described how the size of the Omaha district required a different approach to test security and reliability, but kept the emphasis on teachers' classroom assessments. "We're doing the same kinds of things. Teachers work together and continue their learning. We're doing what's best for kids."

The Department has a visual for the assessment model, which shows how the system builds up from students and teachers. "In this model, the most important players are at the bottom," Roschewski explains. It's a near perfect reversal from models in which those farthest from classrooms direct accountability systems.

So far, STARS has been very successful, according to the Nebraska delegation. In just two years since disaggregated data has been available, the state has seen improvements in achievement across the board. Achievement gaps have narrowed and English Language Learners have made real progress as a group. 

One key to the system is targeted professional development, much of it provided by the Department of Education-what Roschewski describes as the Department's "bottom line." To accommodate teachers, the state has provided additional professional development days to school schedules. The Department is not the only professional development provider: teams of teachers who have developed expertise in assessment provide it for their peers as well. Teacher teams also review the assessments of districts and their reliability ratings.

In addition to working with local school districts, the Department works with teacher education institutions to improve the assessment preparation of pre-service teachers. "When we started this effort in Nebraska, we were really starting from scratch. Accountability was almost entirely at the local level, except for any federal reporting requirements the district had," Roschewski explains. "So we had to do training with the teacher education institutions as well as with practicing teachers and administrators. Now we get first year teachers in the room with faculty from universities so the new teachers can say what they need to be able to do when they started teaching."

All this training and responsibility has turned Nebraska teachers into assessment experts. More importantly it has improved teaching. "The opportunity to be a good teacher is really there now," Roschewski explains. "STARS changes the way you teach. Teachers can see the classroom relevance. That's when we get a lot of teachers on board."

STARS makes assessment part of the information system of each classroom. "It's not so much an accountability tool as part of the curriculum, instruction, assessment loop," Roschewski continues.
 
According to Klemke, teachers feel a lot of ownership and responsibility for the process. "We own the assessment product and we know how to use it," she said.

Developing and implementing STARS has had its challenges. It places additional responsibility on teachers and has required almost everyone involved in schools to expand their learning, creating some resistance along the way. Getting the system approved to meet the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind has not been easy. Currently the state is designated "approval pending." Some in Nebraska are pushing for an accountability system that yields a single "score" and makes it possible to rank schools according to that score.

The Nebraska team recognized the challenges. But in their presentation, they always circled back to the ways the system works to improve student learning, how it incorporates checks and balances to prevent abuse and misuse of the data that is produced, how it generates solutions at the local level, and how it encourages responsibility rather than punitive oversight and control.

That is the kind of accountability many advocates for rural kids want.

Learn more about STARS at the Nebraska Department of Education.

See the power point of the REWG presentation on STARS.