Educators, parents, and students have decried the excessiveness of standardized testing, the limitations it places on curriculum and school culture, and the racial and economic inequities it contributes to.

The NY Performance Standards Consortium has created and documented another option: a performance assessment system that not only graduates students at remarkable rates and prepares them to thrive in college but also instills meaning and a sense of purpose back into the classroom.

“It's not just memorizing the content. It's about understanding it, and being able to use what you're learning.”

- Consortium Graduate & First Generation College Student at CUNY

The Consortium Assessment System

In the Consortium’s performance assessment system, assessment tasks grow out of the work of the classroom.  They are not imposed on curriculum, a process that inevitably leads to teaching-to-the-test. Tasks become possibilities for assessment only after students and teachers have studied the material, discussed and debated it, and subjected it to their questions and writing. 

Out of this engagement and the relationships it develops in the classroom, both teacher and student become the creators of the task and take ownership of it. 

The foundation of the Consortium assessment system, making it distinct from even other systems currently labeled performance assessment, is the professionalism of its teachers and the opportunity for student voice and choice. 

None of these vital components is possible in an assessment system that is pre-packaged, top-down, standardized, and unresponsive to the dynamic life of the classroom.

Our Approach To Performance Assessment

The assessment process begins with students’ enrollment. Our schools’ literacy-based culture focuses on extensive reading, writing, and discussion across content areas in every grade, building towards the graduation-level performance-based assessment tasks, known as PBATs.  All Consortium students prepare PBAT papers and oral presentations:

• Analytic essays on literature

• Social studies research papers

• Lab reports of original science experiments or engineering designs

• Narratives of the process and solution of mathematical problem solving

• Individual schools also add tasks in the arts, art criticism, World Language, internship, or other areas.

Graduation-level PBATs are evaluated by external assessors using Consortium rubrics for both writing and oral presentations. In addition, a series of interim assessments, roundtables, classroom argumentation based on content and evidence, creative and first-person writing, and hands-on projects all prepare students for their final PBATs.  

Consortium teachers commit to the many layers of work and collaboration required to support performance assessment. They design challenging curricula and tasks, respond to student interests and needs, develop and revise rubrics, and participate in Consortium and school-based professional development. Collaboration is extensive, from observing each other’s classrooms, to serving as external evaluators, sharing curriculum, and evaluating each other’s assignments and student work at bi-annual moderation studies. The professionals who participate in Consortium schools share a unique role in the ongoing history of education in the U.S.