Rachael: Hi, you are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. This podcast is part of the leadup to the upcoming measure what we value Summit scheduled for February 5th through 6th 2025 in Fresno, California. The summit emphasizes honoring and amplifying student voices, fostering inclusive classrooms and equipping Educators with tools for impactful change. You can find more information at parsecsummit.com. Today we are talking to Tony Alpert, the executive director of Smarter Balanced, where he leads a 12 member State Consortium to develop and maintain Innovative assessment systems that serve the needs of students, Educators and States. A national expert in educational assessment design, Tony focuses on leveraging technology to enhance equity and improve learning outcomes.

With nearly 25 years of experience, he has held leadership roles in educational assessment and finance, including serving as the Director of a assessment at the Oregon Department of Education. Tony has also contributed to National efforts as a member of the US Department of education's technical advisory committee and through leadership on grants from the US Department of Education and the Hewlett Foundation. Tony, thank you for joining me today.

Tony: Thank you for having me.

Rachael: I'm excited one just to catch up because we've connected in a different lifetime, when I was at the California Department of Education and in the smarter balance Consortium, and this is kind of a different conversation today. So we want to just start with a little bit about your journey and what led you into your role and how you ended up in education, assessment of all things, and what that looks like for you.

Tony: Yeah, I would say like most assessment. Folks. I didn't start out as a young child hoping to be an executive director of a multi-state Consortium that creates tests and resources to improve TOS teaching and learning.

Rachael: That wasn't on your list, teacher, executive director of assessment.

Tony: Maybe there someone out there that's top on their list, but it wasn't mine. I was when I went into college. I was interested in development, so I was at the University of Minnesota. They had a really strong child development program and so I went through that as my undergraduate degree and that, I think, laid a foundation for thinking about growth and change and how we're similar and how we're different as humans in that regard. And so I went. I've got a job at basic research at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene and I was doing some basic data analysis Bas supporting basic research with data analysis, looking at some observational data among families and Adolescence and so I learned a lot on the job about some Advanced.

Analyses and measuring growth using those analyes. So but that and that was really a powerful learning experience. It at the time, though, it was all based on Grant funds, and so that made me a little bit uncomfortable, so I started looking for a more permanent position. I worked briefly at the Oregon Department of Corrections, which I know they have a lot of data needed data analysts so I worked as a research analyst on those systems, which was really helpful in terms of better understanding large scale data and being able to do queries and really refining my operational understanding of Statistics, but it was not how I wanted to end my career by any stretch of the imagination and really didn't Focus on the positive aspects of development. So I got had a job at the Oregon Department of Education supporting their early version of their Statewide accountability system. At that point it was called the report card.

It was the new part of. Nclb and there I had a better, much better gruin understanding of educational data and the various ways that we can describe progress and change and growth. Sometimes those mean the same thing, sometimes they don't. We ineducation, we tend to treat them as synonyms and eventually moved into the assessment division, focus on reporting, again with an emphasis on understanding both status and growth, and then became the director of assessment and spent six years really better understanding how assessment could be helpful and not so helpful to helping educators. With their primary mission of helping students learn. So that was where I learned how to learn from Educators regarding assessment, and that was probably the most important thing I could have learned in that position.

Rachael: Yeah, I, one of the things that you said that I did not realize and never came up in our discussions is this kind of foundation with Early Education and childhood development, and I'm just knowing, I think some of the things that make the assessments that espc provides really set some apart. How do you feel like that informed the work that you were doing at Smarter Balanced when you look at assessments? The piece that really hit me was how you said how are similar and how.

Tony: I can't take responsibility for any particular element of the design of Smarter Balanced. It really was multi-state Le effort with a tremendous amount of feedback, if we think just about the achievement level setting process where we established the cut scores, which was at the end of the design process. That included over 2,000 people that participated online and 500 people in person for almost a week and a week of their time so, and it took actually I think two weeks in Texas. We were there bringing in multiple groups and then having them engage in a multi-group discussion and individual grou. It was an immensely complex Arrangement and there were Educators and family members and higher education. Faculty and there were contractors that were all working tirelessly to make this all happen in an incredibly short period of time.

But even and then stepping back, we always had a strong feedback loop and a transparence process. So any drafts that we produced early on we put out, we got publicly, we got feedback, we revised based on that feedback. So the initial design was really a draft based on the best elements that states had available. So, essentially, raising the floor, we didn't. We knew that we had a limit to what we could propose. That was actually something that every state could Implement.

So we kind of raised the floor but kept the ceiling. If will, is to make sure that the system would work for the people that need to use it, and I'm just grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in discussions.

Rachael: Yeah, and I love that. I mean that's massive to bring in so many different view points, perspectives. The feedback of especially the educator piece is so important when we think. Assessments, the. I know you're going to be joining us for the summit, which I'm really excited about. Tell us a little bit about your session.

Tony: Digging deeper with Smarter Balanced data: yeah, it's, for me it's a it's. It's something that I've always wanted to have the opportunity to do is talk with Educators about their specific data and have a working session where we walk through what they're, what they're thinking about, what context they're bringing into their lens of their data and seeing to what extent I can provide some additional framing or Insight or orientation on helping them start to decompose it a little bit. It can be an overwhelming amount just with a single grade. If we're looking at groups of students across ELA and math and assuming that there are only seven groups that one is looking at, that's 14 data points just for a single grade, and that's if you don't start breaking it out by level or interventions or other groupings and so quickly the amount of data can be. Incapacitating. So what are the, what are the ways we can start stepping through a view of it, a lens of it and engaging in some discussions to think about what is similar, what is different, what has changed in what we're doing.

That might be describ, that the data might described or might be inconsistent with the data, and it's really those inconsistencies that I think are the most. Intriguing, especially with the summative data. The summit of data doesn't ever really answer question answer questions, but it does serve as a foundation for asking good questions, and so that's I think what the session is about is starting to ask those questions and try and bring people together in a collaborative way to discuss potential answers that they might have and share those. It was always my hope that a common assessment would yield common Sol solutions to common problems and maybe even common solutions to unique problem, but really the heart of that is collaboration and opening up bones for conversations.

Rachael: Yeah, so I just read for our listeners that maybe aren't familiar with education: could you share just a little bit about what the smarter balance Consortium has to offer? Because you're you're distinguishing assitive assessments from other things. So maybe if we could just give a quick overview of what does that mean and look like?

Tony: Yeah, thank you. So, at a at a really high level, we, this Consortium, offers tools to improve teaching and learning and tools to improve systems, and when we think about tools to improve systems, we're thinking about the endof year assessments that are consistent, have a consistent interpretation within a district or across districts and across a state, so that we can get a snapshot of how Educational Systems are doing, so that they can continue doing what's working and stop doing what's not working but ultimately improve. And it's important to think about these systems as a method of improving rather than punishing, which I think is a sad side effect of what was otherwise the positive intent of the federal laws associated with assessments and accountability. So my push is to use this in the manner in which we intend it, which is to support Educators to improve the Educational Systems that serve students. The other side of that is improving teaching and learning more directly, and so we offer a variety of resources for teachers, including little testlets that focus in on relatively small areas of content, like fractions at grade three, and then we provide instructional resources linked to those little testlets that teachers can then use to elicit more information from their students about what's, what did they learn from their initial lessons, what might they need additional support on, and then provides the resource to provide some guidance for teachers about how to fill in some gaps that they might have identified through that additional instructional event or activity.

Rachael: I, one of the things that when you and I met and we were talking about our assessment that really hit home for me that you continued to say was two things. One is that this is it truly is meant to be for continuous Improvement, like how do we see and identify the gaps that we have? But for teaching and learning, like for the educator, for the administrator, for the district leader to be able to have that scope of where do we need to cide professional development? Where do we need to reexamine curriculum? The onus is on the educator, which is such a shift from, I think sometimes we think about the student and it actually labeling a student versus helping us to see where do we need to improve our instructional practices. And what does that mean?

We look up?

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. And Shelby Cole, who was a former staff member Smarter Balanced, who is now a technical adviser for smarter balance and is currently at student achievement Partners, describes that we really need to interrogate the systems before we blame students, and usually we can find a flaw in the system. So we don't ever we rarely should get to blaming the. Yeah, but really thinking about the ways in which the system and adults in the system are or are not supporting individual students well and what we can do better to help them learn more is a primary step in the questioning process, I think when we're looking at these data.

Rachael: Yeah, that's right. So when you think about our audience of who's going to be attending the sum we'll have school leaders and practitioners without giving everything away from what we've just talked about, can you give one tangible example of how they might be able to apply something that you're going to be discussing to their local context?

Tony: Yeah, I think you at an extremely high level. Just looking at math and ELA this year as compared to last year, did it go up, did it go down? What did you expect? What changes did you have between last year and this year in your programming, in your curriculum, in your Staffing that might relate to those changes? And even that's probably a 15minute conversation with any individual, yeah, and that's not even getting at the groups of students if they the students are have a disability or if they're emerging English Learners, getting into that detail and understanding the specific changes in the programs that might be associated with changes in the data. That's the highest level.

I think the what the conversation that I'd like to start having is talking about the scope and sequence of the curriculum and the emphasis of instruction, and to what extent are the patterns that they're seeing in the data consistent with the emphasis of instruction and the depth of the curricula that the districts are using if they have adopted curricula. So that's the type of conversation that I hope we can have and I hope that it's interactive. I hope that I learn more selfishly than what people coming to the session will necessarily learn.

Rachael: I love that. So when for you, what are you most looking forward to in coming to the Summit?

Tony: Well having that conversation and hearing from folks about how is the data helpful, what would be more helpful for them. Is there a present, is there a type of data that would be more helpful? Is there way to present the data that would be more helpful, but better understanding the context that they're in and is? Are there ways in which we can support them, Educators, in using these data to better understand that context and to engage in that self-reflection that's so critical to Improvement? So, yeah, looking forward to that whole process.

Rachael: So, as we wrap up, I want to give you the final word for our listeners. Any Sage advice, thoughts to ponder, what would you like to leave us with?

Tony: Be nice to each. Other.

Rachael: [speaker uncertain] Is it only within the scope of be nice to each other and be kind?

Tony: [speaker uncertain] I mean, that's what about? Sums it up?

Rachael: Huh, right, we'll leave it at that then. Well, perfect. Thank you, Tony, for your time today. I really appreciated it.

Tony: Thank you, take care.

Rachael: Parsec education is hosting the measure what we value Summit on February 5th through 6th in Fresno, California. Join us for impactful conversations on empathy, engagement, hard truth, some more, alongside leaders like Shaka Booker, Rich stole, Tony Alpert and student speaker like Liliana Sanchez and Timi Ilori. Tickets are limited, so make sure you secure your spot today. Get your tickets at parsecsummit.com.

--- This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.