ERIC ED436765: The Portfolio Project: A Study of Assessment, Instruction, and Middle School Reform.

276 Pages·1999·3.5 MB·English

by  ERIC

DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 436 765
CS 216 944
AUTHOR
Underwood, Terry
TITLE
The Portfolio Project: A Study of Assessment, Instruction,
and Middle School Reform.
INSTITUTION
National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL.
ISBN
ISBN-0-8141-3628-1
PUB DATE
1999-00-00
NOTE
279p.
AVAILABLE FROM
National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon
Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 36281-0015: $19.95
members, $26.95 nonmembers). Tel: [phone]; Web site
<http://www.ncte.org>.
PUB TYPE
Reports
General (140)
Reports
Research (143)
EDRS PRICE
MF01/PC12 Plus Postage.
DESCRIPTORS
Case Studies; Curriculum Development; *Educational Change;
*Educational Policy; Educational Research; Middle Schools;
*Portfolio Assessment; Public Schools
IDENTIFIERS
*California; *Educational Issues; Implementation Analysis
ABSTRACT
This book is a study, in research-based narrative form, of
one middle school's implementation of a new portfolio assessment plan in
response to statewide policy changes in California. The book highlights the
interactions of state, district, and local forces as teachers work to
implement a portfolio-assessment plan that collects student work and
evaluates it systematically. It examines a portfolio-assessment project that
views student work through three progressive lenses: warm, value free; cool,
analytical; and hard, critical. The plot of the book traverses a 15-year
period in California during which assessment drove instruction across the
state, often in unexamined and contradictory ways, always in powerful
ways.
The book traces the ebb and flow of a variety of assessment philosophies
located in living rooms, classrooms, principals' offices, district
headquarters, and in downtown Sacramento (the state capital)--a variety of
philosophies coming and going that left behind fixed, predictable histories
of conflict in classrooms. Its story appears to have parallels in the recent
history of schools all over the United States. Chapters in the book
are:
(1)
"Washers, Dryers, and School Reformers";
"The Portfolio-Assessment System
(2)
as an Innovation at Charles Ruff";
(3) "Portfolios in Review";
"The Seeds
(4)
of Change in California, 1983-1994";
"Ruff Unified School District";
(5)
(6)
"Inside the Middle (School)";
"Ruff Instruction";
"Ruff Students and
(7)
(8)
Their Portfolios"; and (9)
"Conclusions and Implications." Contains an
Epilogue, an Appendix giving the research method, and an extensive list of
works cited.
(NKA)
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The Portfolio Project
NCTE Editorial Board: Jacqueline Bryant, Kermit Campbell, Bobbi Fisher, Xin
Liu Gale, Sarah Hudelson, Bill McBride, Gerald R. Og lan, Helen Poole, Karen
Smith, Chair, ex officio, Michael Greer, ex officio
The Portfolio Project
A Study of Assessment, Instruction, and
Middle School Reform
Terry Underwood
California State University, Sacramento
National Council of Teachers of English
1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096
For Joanne and Karen
Staff Editor: Rita D. Disroe
Cover Design and Prepress Services: Precision Graphics
Cover Photographs © Elizabeth Crews
NCTE Stock Number: 36281-3050
© 1999 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a
forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teach-
ing of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular
point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the
Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of
policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The portfolio project : a study of assessment, instruction, and
middle school reform / Terry Underwood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241) and index.
ISBN 0-8141-3628-1 (paper)
1. Portfolios in educationCalifornia Case studies.
2. Educational tests and measurementsCalifornia Case studies.
I. Title
LB1029.P67U53
1999
371.39dc21
99-42587
CIP
6
It is necessary, then, to be satisfied with swirls, confluxions, and
inconstant connections; clouds collecting, clouds dispersing. There is
no general story to be told, no synoptic picture to be had. Or if there
is, no one, certainly no one wandering into the middle of them like
Fabrice at Waterloo, is in a position to construct them, neither at the
time nor later. What we can construct, if we keep notes and survive,
are hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to
have happened: pieced-together patternings after the fact. To state
this mere observation about what actually takes place when someone
tries to "make sense" out of something known about from assorted
materials while poking about in the accidental dramas of the common
world is to bring on a train of worrying questions. What has become
of objectivity? What assures us that we have things right? Where has
all the science gone? It may just be, however, that all understanding
(and indeed, if distributive, bottom-up models of the brain are right,
consciousness as such) trails life in just this way. Floundering
through mere happenings and then concocting accounts of how they
hang together is what knowledge and illusion alike consist in. The
accounts are concocted out of available notions, cultural equipment
ready to hand. But like any equipment it is brought to the task; value
added, not extracted. If objectivity, rightness, and science are to be
had it is not by pretending they run free of the exertions which make
or unmake them.
Clifford Geertz, After the Fact (1995)
7
vii
Contents
ix
Introduction
xv
Acknowledgments
1. Washers, Dryers, and School Reformers
1
2. The Portfolio-Assessment System as an Innovation
at Charles Ruff
17
3. Portfolios in Review
33
4. The Seeds of Change in California, 1983-1994
61
5. Ruff Unified School District
78
6. Inside the Middle (School)
97
7. Ruff Instruction
124
8. Ruff Students and Their Portfolios
169
9. Conclusions and Implications
202
219
Epilogue: Three Years Later
. .
.
233
Appendix
241
Works Cited
253
Index
Author
259
8
ix
Introduction
portfolio assessment arrived in the northern California district in
which I was teaching during the late 1980s on the crest of a frenzy
of reform, a frenzy stirred up by a state department of education
bent on changing the thoughtlessness its leaders perceived as being
characteristic of public education. Motivated by the reverberations of a
spate of published critiques of schooling such as Sizer's Horace's
Compromise (1984) and Good lad's A Place Called School (1984), Cali-
fornia's policymakers and educators had joined hands in an effort to
change the way schools forged the minds of the future in their class-
rooms. Like many others nationwide, my district was valiantly trying,
if only semiconsciously, to do what people now call, either scornfully
or nostalgically, "whole language." This district wanted to be a part of
the tidal wave of child-centered sentiment that was sweeping phonics
workbooks, spellers, and grammar lessons from classrooms and leav-
ing behind "good literature" in its wake. We wanted children to care
about literacy. The idea then was to give children a "print-rich envi-
ronment," to invite them to join Frank Smith's "literacy club," to hook
adolescents and young adults on literature, to get them excited about
the joy and power of books. The movement affirmed the centrality of
student engagement, identity, and purpose in classroom literacy prac-
tices; it validated the teacher as a professional who possessed expert
knowledge and skill; and it paid sustained attention to assessment as
a powerful variable in the production and reproduction of classroom
cultures.
I can no longer remember who first called "portfolio assessment"
an oxymoron, an exemplar of the triumph of syntax over logic as in
"mandatory recreational" reading (or simply "recreational reading" for
too many students). When I first heard the phrase at an inservice dur-
ing the late 1980s, I thought that this clever oxymoronic characteriza-
tion held more than enough truth to explain the nods of approval and
knowing smiles among my colleagues in the California Writing Project.
Of course portfolio assessment was an oxymoron! The portfolios of stu-
dent writing we had reviewed in Writing Project workshops were
provocative, inspiring, interesting; but what little we had seen of port-
folios in the name of assessment was disturbing. Portfolios were meant
to empower, to engage, to emancipate. Assessment was by nature con-
trolling, limiting, and conforming.
9
x
The Portfolio Project
So when my district ordered its newly adopted basal reading
series for its grade schools in the mid-1980sa basal series which had
been completely revised to reflect someone's version of whole lan-
guage principlesit should not have been a surprise to find both the
absence of phonics workbooks and the presence of a rather schizo-
phrenic portfolio-assessment system. The basal portfolio-assessment
systema huge oxymoron if ever there was onecame in class sets
wrapped in clear plastic; that is, the flimsy light-brown assessment
pamphlets with tear-out pages came packaged in shrink wrap, with
enough materials per teacher to cover a whole classroom of students.
The pamphlets contained a set of three reading tests, little more than
end-of-story comprehension questions to which students wrote
answers three times a year, to be scored by each teacher-of-record and
stored in folders to go on to the next grade level at year's end. There
were also some multiple-choice "skills" tests, much more easily graded
than were the open-ended reading responses. And there were Likert-
like scales that asked students to rate their level of enjoyment or inter-
est in the story according to degrees of smile or frown on a circular
face. In addition to these periodic comprehension and skills exams, the
district had announced a plan to mandate that teachers collect writing
samples tied to uniform prompts as a part of each student's portfolio.
But why, teachers across the district asked.
Why were all of these papers being stuffed in folders and saved?
Most of the students couldn't read the "good literature" in the basal
anywayit was much too difficult for most grade levelsso why were
teachers being required to give students comprehension tests and then
to save them? Who was going to look at them, anyway? Since each
teacher scored the reading responses alone and nobody knew whether
there was any continuity at all across the district, who could even make
sense of the scores? Was it simply a way of putting on a show of reform?
And where were these folders supposed to be stored, anyway?
What were teachers supposed to do when boxes upon boxes of portfo-
lios piled up in their rooms, in the hallwayseven in the library? What
were the middle schools to do at the end of the year when their half-
dozen or so elementary feeder schools shipped over truckloads of
boxes of portfolios that the English teachers could make no sense of
and had no use for?
Could the students decorate the covers, at least?
Eventually, of course, this attempt to implement a standardized
portfolio-assessment system across a large, diverse, and rapidly growing
school district failed. No one could use data generated by the system to
10