Alaska superintendents who testified at a legislative hearing Wednesday praised the state education department's decision to scrap the Alaska Measures of Progress test and look for a new standardized exam for next school year.
But the new test — whatever it may look like — must provide score reports that can inform teachers and parents, said superintendents who testified. That demand for more in-depth reporting has been the steady, vocal message from state educators since they received score reports from the new exam in the fall. They said the reports didn't dive deep enough into what specific academic standards students met and didn't meet.
"I am elated to hear that the AMP test will be discontinued," Dave Herbert, superintendent of St. Mary's School District on the Yukon River delta, told legislators at Wednesday morning's Joint House-Senate Education Committee meeting.
However, Herbert said his community didn't understand how the state could have spent so much time and money on the Alaska Measures of Progress test, and then not get useful score reports out of it.
"We find this simply to be unacceptable," he said. "My hope in moving forward is that the state will very carefully analyze any future assessments and make sure that any assessment that's adopted informs instruction."
Kevin Shipley, superintendent at the Kake City School District in Southeast Alaska, said Alaska's school system needs to establish a statewide plan for standardized testing, academic standards and teacher evaluations.
"We need to get it right this time," Shipley said. "In our tight financial time we cannot afford missteps."
In a brief statement at the end of the morning meeting, Alaska Education Commissioner Mike Hanley said the state couldn't continue with the AMP test because too many people had lost confidence in it as a testing tool.
"We're going to make sure we do it right," Hanley said.
Some Alaska legislators said at the end of the meeting they had many questions for Hanley about what went wrong with the standardized test, but they had run out of time.
"I want to congratulate you for the courage to change," Rep. Liz Vazquez, R-Anchorage, told Hanley. "But I do want to explore what went wrong with AMP."
Hanley said in an interview after the meeting that no big, recent event prompted him to announce the education department would issue a new request for proposals to replace the statewide standardized test by spring 2017.
Alaska students have only taken the AMP test once -- last spring.
About a year before, the state education department contracted the Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas to develop an Alaska-specific standardized test based on new academic standards for English and math.
The contract would span five years and total $25 million. Margaret MacKinnon, the education department's director of assessment and accountability, said in an email Wednesday the state has paid the Kansas research center about $7.1 million so far.
The state expects to pay about $9.1 million total for two years of testing, MacKinnon said. The state can get out of the contract with the research center each June, Hanley said.
Alaska's students will again take the AMP in March, as required by state and federal law. The center has hired a subcontractor at its own expense to help with score reports.
Hanley said he hopes to have a different test in place by next spring.
When the Kansas institute was chosen about two years ago, Rep. Lance Pruitt, R-Anchorage, was the only lawmaker to sit on the five-member search committee. He said Hanley asked him to sit on the committee.
Pruitt said Wednesday he didn't remember much from the three-day selection process and he said a lot of the conversations during that time were confidential.
He said he couldn't remember if he gave the Kansas research center the highest score, but he remembers the center appeared to be the most willing to make sure the test was the right fit for Alaska's school districts.
Hanley said since the Kansas center is a relatively small operation, he felt Alaska could have a big say in the development of the test. The center also developed a statewide test for Kansas.
Alaskans reviewed all of the questions on the AMP and wrote some of the reading passages, Hanley said. "We had Alaskans set some of the cut scores, so we were very engaged in that respect," he said.
Hanley said that while the administration of the computer-based standardized test went well, the score reporting did not. The score reports got delayed for weeks. Once released in November, they showed that less than half of the students met new education standards for English and math.
But that wasn't the problem. The reports had confusing graphics and didn't go deep enough into students' performances, Hanley said.
"We felt we had set clear expectations," he said.
Marianne Perie, a project director at the Kansas center, has said problems started in late summer when two of the center's top employees had to take extended time off, one eventually quitting, amid serious medical concerns.
Neal Kingston, director of the Kansas center, said Wednesday the center wasn't prepared for so many Alaska students to have to take the test on paper because they didn't have computer access. That created problems with data collection, he said.
Kingston said the center also saw a lot of students start taking the test in one school and finish it in another.
While these were problems the center faced, he said he didn't want them to sound like excuses.
He said the center had planned to address challenges in the second administration of the test. Eventually, the test would include questions that required students to write out answers. Those questions would have also increased the depth of score reports, he said.
Hanley said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which ended the more rigid No Child Left Behind law of 2001, provides new flexibility for states in designing their testing systems. However it still requires a statewide standardized test.
But James Fields, chair of the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development, said he hopes with the next standardized test, educators and parents will see usable data sooner than three years out.