Academy for Educational Development

Washington, D.C., January 25, 2006 — One size doesn’t always fit all, especially when it comes to academic assessments and the students and schools don’t fit the typical mold. A conference being held today by the Academy for Educational Development will begin to explore the issue of how to accurately assess students in schools that use youth development principles in their approach to education.

With funding from the C.S. Mott Foundation, the AED Center for Youth Development and Policy Research surveyed a small set of community-based organization (CBO) schools to determine how they have been faring under the federal No Child Left Behind law. These CBO schools incorporate positive youth development practices into their education model, and are operated by nonprofit organizations located in the community the school serves. These are often charter schools, or other diploma-granting schools with a non-profit status. Some CBO schools are structured like traditional schools, but most follow very different, nontraditional models, and serve nontraditional students.

A new report from AED, Testing for All Walks of Life: Assessing with Standards vs. Standardizing Assessment, details the challenges a sample of CBO schools have faced when it comes to accurately assessing their students’ progress. The report is the first in what will be a series of reports covering CBO schools and expanded assessment. “CBO schools are a vital part of the education landscape in the United States and must be held to high standards,” said Bonnie Politz, director of the AED Center for Youth Development and Policy Research. “However, while they often have very challenging student populations, they are still expected to test their students with the same instruments used in more traditional schools.”

CBO schools often enroll students who have previously dropped out of school, are involved in the juvenile justice system, or have low academic achievement levels. These conditions all lead to very low scores on “fill-in-the-bubble” tests that are generally used to determine a school’s annual yearly progress under No Child Left Behind.

According to administrators surveyed in the report, students in CBO schools benefit from rigorous tests that use multiple methods to show their academic progress, such as portfolios of work, essays, and presentations, for example.

“How students score on a traditional test does not necessarily reflect what they know or are able to do,” said Noel Trouth, the principal of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps Charter School. “There are more accurate ways to gauge students’ knowledge and progress.”

The report will be used as the basis for discussion in today’s conference. The conference will be held in Academy Hall at AED, 1825 Connecticut Ave., N.W., 8th floor, Washington, D.C., 20009.

###