Kevin Shelly reported last week about Camden’s graduation process. He showed that many students are graduating not by passing standardized testing, but through an appeals process. That’s created quite a backlash from all sides of the aisle. Laura Waters wrote defending the district. Camden School Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard wrote defending the students. Keith Benson wrote an important rejoinder, reminding us that test scores reflect socio-economics first and foremost, and using them as a graduation requirement is a recent phenomena largely criticized by those in urban school districts. I want to write defending the appeals process itself, as one that focuses on a student’s broader portfolio, not his test-taking ability, and one that should be used not just in Camden, but in all districts.

First of all, kudos to the Camden School District. While there’s token language about “rigor” in Paymon’s editorial, the article also acknowledges: 

“These students have worked hard to get to the finish line, and nothing can take that accomplishment away… Students throughout the state graduate from high school through the appeals process, which is created, offered and approved by the state.”

This matters because it is one of the rare comments from the district that acknowledges how flawed testing can be in serving our low-income students. Keith Benson takes it from there: 

The article never mentions the long-validated hypotheses that income and performance on standardized tests are directly proportional; the higher the income background, the better performance on standardized tests…

Vast educational research illustrates the inherent inability of standardized tests to fairly assess all students, from all backgrounds. For a variety of reasons, including cultural and linguistic mismatch within tests, students from low-socioeconomic communities perform poorly on standardized assessments, which are neither objective nor neutral.

Rouhanifard’s acknowledgment of the work Camden students are putting in to graduate is a welcome sign that the district is starting to understand that test scores are not a particularly valuable way to understand education in Camden. Of course, there’s plenty of irony here. It is only when the district is evaluated, based on graduation rates, that things like student work are appreciated. It is a convenient time to “realize” that test scores aren’t a universal education measurement. Let’s hope this awareness extends to school evaluations and teacher evaluations. 

But the bigger gap here is what this appeals process actually looks like. I reached out to Keith Benson for more explanation: 

The appeals process you inquired about is actually a multi -pronged to process. If students do not pass the HSPA, they have to take a class called ASHA, which is tasked with preparing students to pass the next time around. Throughout that class students are given assignments that reflect what section of the exam they did not pass. That collection of work is compiled into a portfolio. Assuming that it is done correctly and mastery is exhibited that portfolio can be sent to the state as proof that the student knows what they did not exhibit on the exam. So in math specifically where most students fail in the city, it is very common like I remember in my schooling years, where students “know” the work sitting in class, or in the presence of a teacher, and then under different circumstances completely freeze, falsely demonstrating they know nothing about the problem. This portfolio approach which is approved by the department of education helps ameliorate that situation. Thus, students must pass the corrective class and submit packets of work showing mastery in a specific area to justify graduation.

Wow! This “loophole” is actually portfolio-based assessment. I’d argue, and plenty of education scholars will be with me on this, that a portfolio model is likely to do a better job mediating the disadvantages that come through culturally-baised standardized testing, or socio-economic status, because it looks directly at student work. Portfolio assessment may be difficult to use when it comes to comparing schools or districts, simply because of the amount of labor needed to compare portfolios. But it’s an excellent way to cut through systematic biases and get a sense of individual students and their abilities. In other words, it’s an ideal system for use in an urban school district that must deal with serious poverty, like Camden.

Plenty of folks are arguing that we need to be moving farther towards portfolio-based assessment, not away from it. A friend of mine from Oxford, Steve Silvius, has a start-up, ThreeRing, dedicated to giving teachers technical tools to make portfolio assessment more feasible for teachers. The idea is simple: student work is a better reflection of a student’s ability than test-scores. Plenty of folks who struggled with test-taking are nodding their heads right now.

So let’s rewrite those headlines. The Camden School District is not using a “Graduation Loophole.” It’s using a more pedagogically appropriate form of assessment. The headline should be, “Camden School District uses Portfolios for Graduation,” not “Graduation Loophole Common in Camden.” More school districts should be looking into portfolio assessment, not running away from it.