Building With Benchmarks: The Role of the District in Philadelphia's Benchmark Assessment System

Abstract

In recent years, interim assessments have become an increasingly popular tool in districts seeking to improve student learning and achievement. Philadelphia has been at the forefront of this change, implementing a set of Benchmark assessments aligned with its Core Curriculum district-wide in 2004. In this article, we examine the overall context for Benchmarks in Philadelphia, the expectations district leaders had for the use of those Benchmarks, the supports put in place to assist those in schools in meeting those expectations, and the challenges encountered in that implementation.

Research for this article was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant REC-0529485 to the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania and by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the William Penn Foundation to Research for Action. The opinions expressed in this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, or the institutional partners of CPRE.

Notes

This section is a substantially revised and updated version of an earlier report by Useem, Christman, and Boyd (2006).

A review of accounts of benchmark use (largely in Education Week) led us to the conclusion that, in other districts, such tests are given between three times a year and monthly. Aside from Philadelphia, we did not identify any other districts in either Pennsylvania or across the nation where time was explicitly set aside for addressing weaknesses found through analyzing benchmark data.

Discussions of the Teacher Reflection Protocol were much more common in the low-performing schools studied by RFA.

Although using the Benchmark assessments for predictive purposes has a certain logic, given that the district believed the Benchmark Assessments to be aligned with state standards, we were unable to find any evidence that prediction studies had been done in data collection for either the CPRE or the RFA studies.

Edison used their own Benchmark Assessments, which were part of the overall instructional program they brought to the schools they managed.

In fact, the Benchmark assessment did not simulate the format of the PSSA. This quote is from an interview conducted by RFA for a separate study that predated the data collection described in the Methods section.