From Mutiny to Unity: Poway's Success Story

Ray Wilson and John Collins have gained national praise for building an unusual assessment success story in Poway. Their success is marked by students using the district benchmark tests to set their own learning goals, teachers learning where their students need help most, and principals having evidence that was understood by all to evaluate school performance.

Like many successes, this started with a defeat. In 2002, Poway's leaders implemented a benchmark assessment. Teachers and many principals rebelled, rejecting it entirely. So, the district asked Ray Wilson, director of assessment, to start over. He began by listening and learned that the teachers' concerns had merit.

Forming a district assessment task force led jointly by Ray and a teacher representative from the local teachers' union, the task force distilled and refined teachers' criticisms. They wanted tests that would advance their professionalism, their craft and their skill. Teachers wanted tests that would produce better learning faster. With this in mind, Ray Wilson asked teachers to help rethink the entire assessment program, from the California Standards Tests to classroom quizzes. A new benchmark test program emerged almost two years later from the ashes of the prior failure.

Instead of imposing the program on teachers and schools, Ray Wilson and the assessment task force gave teachers a voice in building their own site-based, articulated assessment plans, school by school. The result was unity. Eventually, all schools chose a common benchmark assessment that enabled teachers to effectively measure growth system-wide. This remarkable story is about the power of building agreement from the bottom up, about what to measure and how to measure it. The end result is also a new internal culture that embraces assessment as a mirror to learning.