 We are honored to have Governor Tom Wolf, representatives of the State Department of Education and Superintendents from two of our neighboring school districts with us today. Over the past few years, Governor Wolf has met with parents, students, and various stakeholders as a part of his commitment to providing a stronger education for all students pre-K through 12 and beyond. He continues to advocate for equitable funding across the state, and the Governor recognizes that in order for Pennsylvania students to compete in our global marketplace, they must have access to a high quality education no matter their zip code. As Superintendents, we have had the opportunity to provide feedback on a range of proposals aimed at retrieving, enhancing, and even restructuring the framework by which students are currently assessed and districts are evaluated. So as a school leader, I personally would like to thank Governor Wolf and members of the Department of Education for not only listening to the voices of educators across the state, but also utilizing our feedback to enact substantive change for our students. Yes, that is a pause for applause. I am excited about today's announcement, and I look forward to our continued partnership to move education, improve education for students across the state. So please join me in welcoming Governor Tom Wolf. Thank you, Tamara. Nice, and I appreciate your allowing us to stand behind you here when you announce that. But I am really pleased to be here to announce a change in the PSSA, the Pennsylvania System for School Assessment, the requirements that our teachers and students and parents have been requesting for a long time. This is long overdue, but for the past three years, not quite three years, almost three years, as a Governor, I've been touring schools all around Pennsylvania, and I have heard from teachers, I've heard from students, I've heard from parents, and my question was always, how can we be the state, be a better partner in education, making sure that our schools do a better job for their children, for our kids. And one of the things I heard most often was the need to reduce the amount of time that our teachers and students spend getting ready for and taking the PSSA tests every year. The problem was how much classroom time was being taken to teach to those tests. So I listened, and all of us listened in the Commonwealth. And after working for nearly a year with Pedro and members of the Department of Education, with educators, with parents, and with stakeholders, I'm proud to announce that beginning next spring, Pennsylvania will reduce the testing time for the PSSA by 20%. About that. And the point is we're reducing the testing time by 20%, but we're not reducing, we're preserving in fact the effectiveness for measuring student progress. We understand the accountability issue, we understand the need for understanding how we're doing in educating our children. We just don't want to spend as much time as we've been spending or forcing our teachers and students to spend as much time as they were spending. So here's what's going to happen. Students in third to eighth grade will spend an average of 20% less time on testing. Students below those grades will spend an average of 25% less time on testing. And all this change will result in a reduction of two full testing days for some schools. This change will allow students and teachers to focus their classroom time on learning the skills they need to get a complete education rather than preparing for one exam. So again, for years I've been hearing, all of us have been hearing about the need to reduce time spent on preparing for the PSSA's and the need to refocus our students and teacher attention back to studies. This change will help satisfy those concerns. And while we have to administer these tests under federal law, we will continue to work with all of our partners to reduce the time spent on testing while keeping the exam's value as a real measure of student progress. All of us want that. The students want that. The teachers want that to know how they're doing. And this step is another piece in my administration's commitment to ensure that our children receive the thorough and efficient education that our Constitution guarantees to every child in Pennsylvania. Because if we want to create success and economic prosperity for future generations, the best investment all of us can make in our future is in our kids. Because with their success comes Pennsylvania's success. Since I became governor, I've been made sure that state government is focusing on actively investing in our children. We've done this by listening to those who are actually in the classroom. We've listened to teachers. We've listened to parents. Again, we've listened to the students. And we've taken steps to make the system better. Today's achievement is another step toward helping our teachers, toward helping our families and kids focus on learning. All of us are going to continue to work with our partners to ensure that we're doing all we can to help our kids succeed. Now, I'm very happy to present to you someone you already know, but someone who I've been working with to try to make sure that we're doing what we need to do to improve, continually improve our education process and our accountability, but in a way that's good for our students and our teachers and our families. And that's Secretary of the Department of Education, Pedro Rivera. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. So, you know, I'm very proud to share with you that our plan is to continue to shift to a more holistic system of education, evaluation and support. Governor has really, you know, over the course of the past two and a half years, the governor has shared his vision for education in the Commonwealth. He has been very explicit, not only in words, but in action. What many of you may not know is the governor actually has taken the time to have a copy of our assessments and our assessment plan in front of him as we engage in conversation. Because for him it was not only about a policy move moving forward, it was really a quality of life issue. So I'm proud to share that under his direction, the team at PDE worked with thousands of stakeholders over the course of the past year and developed our ESSA plan. Our ESSA plan is not just a plan to meet our federal obligations, but it really is a plan to move forward, to ensure that feedback from educators, feedback from students, feedback from community members, business industry leaders, feedback from families were taken and we created a plan to best meet stakeholder needs. We posted our plan just to show and explain the culmination of an extreme amount of feedback and just the culmination of engaged stakeholders. So as the governor announced today, we were able to show a reduction of 20 percent on our state standardized test from grades three through eight. While still maintaining rigor, relevance and a pathway to success for all Pennsylvania students. We also know that not only will our students spend less time testing, but teachers will be spending more time teaching. By ensuring we're kind of, we're chipping away at this test taking culture and we're chipping away at the barriers many educators face in our classrooms every day. So our plan is to continue to shift to a more holistic system of evaluation and support, a system that focuses on the needs of students and the needs of communities they live in and those who serve them. I'm proud that under Governor Wolf's leadership and vision for high quality holistic education and PA, we were able to make those improvements while engaging the many stakeholders we serve and focusing on a more rigorous and holistic plan forward. We also have some stakeholders who are engaged and members of our team that are going to share with you today. And it's my pleasure to take a moment and invite Dr. Mark DeRocco, President of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators to share his perspective on the future of the PSSA and what we're moving, how we're moving towards ensuring all of our kids have rich, rigorous academic opportunities. Thank you, Secretary. It's a pleasure to be here this morning. My name is Mark DeRocco and I'm the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators. And we represent over 800 superintendents, assistant superintendents and school leaders across the Commonwealth. During the development of the process of the ESSA plan, I was then superintendent in the Lewisburg area school district and I was a member of the Department of Education workgroup on assessment. 20 members of our workgroup represented a diverse body of individuals with a variety of perspectives on public education. Our group participated in spirited discussions and heard many points of view on how to best design assessments to meet the ESSA statute. After much deliberation, our group developed a consensus on recommendations for PDE to consider in regard to assessments. Our top priority was to reduce the amount of time required to test students for the state accountability system. The amount of instructional time lost due to the length of the current PSSA testing has been of concern to parents, teachers and administrators for years. Several weeks of instruction in late spring are set aside in Pennsylvania schools to administer the battery of PSSA and Keystone exams. Most schools experience more than a month of disruption in preparation activities, administration of the test and scheduling makeup sessions for these exams. Additional time is often lost throughout the school year as many school districts implement test prep sessions from September all the way through to the March or April testing season. Many educators have long believed that the amount of time currently devoted to testing is excessive and unnecessary. We are pleased that the department has made a commitment to reduce the amount of testing time needed to administer these exams beginning this spring 2018. The new ESSA plan calls for the PSSA English Language Arts test to be reduced from four testing sessions to three and the math test reduced from three testing sessions to two. This change has been received very well by the educational community and we commend the department for listening to the concerns of educators and parents in making this adjustment. Passive supports the Pennsylvania ESSA plan as represented by the department. It is a plan that was forged by thoughtful deliberation based upon the voices of many stakeholders across the state. We look forward to partnering with PDE and school leaders across the Commonwealth to assist with a smooth and effective transition to a new era of supporting children in schools to improve academic achievement in Pennsylvania. And now it's my pleasure to bring forward a superintendent from the area who's done an outstanding job and has led her district with distinction, excuse me, Dr. Sherry Smith from the Lower Dolphin School District. Good morning everyone. I first want to say I appreciate the opportunity that I had to work on one of the work groups as well with the state. It was a great opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders from across the state, parents, folks from many different kinds of organizations and perspectives as we came to consensus on recommendations to bring forward to our state for improvements under ESSA. Today I'm grateful that we are here to talk about one significant recommendation that came forward from our group and that has significant impacts on our schools and our students and that's the reduction of the amount of testing time needed for our third through eighth graders on the PSSAs. Reducing testing time is a very welcome change for our schools, our teachers, and most importantly our students. It's very difficult to motivate students for long days of testing and so particularly for our youngest students, reducing that time allows us to motivate them and to keep it in perspective of what the PSSAs are for. The change still allows for that state accountability, for student achievement and for growth which we all know is very important for us to show across the state. However, it's sensitive to the fact that this is just one measure of achievement for our students. It allows us to spend more time to educating the whole child, more time for instructional time in our schools as we prepare our students to be career and college ready in the future. So my personal thanks to all of our state leaders for listening to the recommendations that came to them from across the state and reducing the testing time for our students. Thank you. I'd now like to introduce my colleague and friend from Stilton High Services, Mr. Travis Waters. Thank you. Before I give my comments, I would be remiss in saying that as a superintendent, you often have sleepless nights and it is comforting to know that we have Governor Wolf and Secretary Rivera supporting us and they helped with those sleepless nights. The reduction in testing times coincides well with the changes made to the performance profile of school districts taking into account various factors that demonstrate school's effectiveness. And this is appreciated from a school district like Stilton High Spire that has an over 80% poverty rate and struggles financially. Over the years, I've heard parents, teachers, administrators, and students voice concern over the amount of time that we spend on standardized tests. This ceremony here demonstrates that we are listening to those concerns and recognizing that you cannot use a snapshot to judge what and how a student is learning as an educator, I appreciate PDEs, Secretary Rivera, and the Governor's efforts on a reduction in testing time. Thank you. Mr. Matt Stem is going to answer questions. Okay, so good morning everyone. My name is Matthew Stem. I'm the Deputy Secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at PDE and under the direction of Governor Wolf and Secretary Rivera, our team has been responsible for working together to come up with the plan that we're moving forward with for the spring of 2018. So I believe we have a few minutes for questions and I'm happy to field those on behalf of the department. Yes, sir. Excellent question. So in terms of how we are still able to cover the breadth and depth of the standards as required, what we're doing is we've been able to take a look at the standards by grade level bands and still ensure that we're covering all of the standards in a valid and reliable way over the course of students' testing career. Can I just, let me just add something to that. First of all, we'll take questions on topic here. I'll have a gaggle if you have other questions. But let me just say accountability is really important and I think all of us are trying to make sure that every parent, every taxpayer can feel comfortable and confident that their children and our children are going to be getting a world-class education. This is not to dilute accountability. This is not to reduce standards. This is actually to try to make the way we test ourselves, the way we try to make sure we have accountability that we're doing it right. I don't know of any continual improvement process that doesn't tweak the system they use to try to figure out if they're doing a good job. So this is not a move away from accountability at all. This is not a move away from high standards. This is an effort to make sure that we're doing a better job of capturing those standards. Correct. So what we've done is we've heard loud and clearly from stakeholders what their perceptions are and as the governor shared, our responsibility is to still ensure that we have a rigorous and valid assessment in place to measure student progress. And so what we do is we work extensively with psychometricians. We have a technical advisory committee that we work with as well and we do all sorts of modeling around what we can do to the tests and still maintain the rigor and validity. And so our teams have worked extensively on that, provided many different options to the department that brought us here today. So in fact some may posit, you know, maybe we haven't gone far enough in reducing two sections and the way we approached it, but we believe we've taken a significant step forward while still maintaining an assessment that's tied to the rigorous standards that we have in Pennsylvania. In simple terms, what are the kids going to see on the test? Sure. Basically what they're going to see is a reduced number of questions on the test. That's what it boils down to. Thank you. That's correct. That's correct. So we're able, by reducing the number of questions, we're able to eliminate one section in English language arts and one section in math. And so for districts that most of whom test one section a day, we've essentially eliminated for those districts two full days of testing. Excellent question. So we're very confident that what we're moving forward is still going to demonstrate that we're testing the depth and breadth of all of our content standards. And so as such, we anticipate that there will not be problems with support from USDE on that move. Actually does the new ESSA standard give the states more flexibility? Right. So ESSA does give additional authority and autonomy to states as long as we can demonstrate what ESSA requires that we still demonstrate that our assessments are aligned to our rigorous standards. Right now testing time grades three through eight, now this varies grade level to grade level. So we've been very rough numbers. Currently students test for roughly eight hours as the administration time. And so this would back it off at many grade levels, 20% below that, roughly six and a half hours or a little bit less per grade level. Yep, every grade level will see a reduction of at least 20% in the total test time with our youngest students in third grade seeing closer to 25% reduction in their time. And that's something we heard loud and clear. We heard specifically from parents and other stakeholders and students themselves for that matter. And in my background, I was a former elementary principal, so I remember these days well. And so we specifically wanted to focus on the youngest students and the impact for them. Nope. The 11th graders, actually there are no specific 11th grade tests. So there's a different high school exam. And our focus has been on the PSSAs because what we've heard most clearly is it's the impact on younger students that's deemed to be not necessarily developmentally appropriate. There are no changes outside of grades three through eight, correct? Yeah, I think what we're looking at, so we have one of the things that we're very open to, the Department of Education submitted a report to the General Assembly last August around potential changes to our graduation system. And we look forward to continuing to collaborate with the General Assembly around any possible changes to the assessment system at the high school level as it relates to graduation. Can I just add something? Sure. My goal is to, and I think all of our goals is to make education more, make it better and more relevant to the needs of the students who are going through school. So we, as Matt pointed out, will continue to try to figure out ways to make our system better. That goes to the fair funding formula. It goes to increased funding for education. It goes to better preparation of teachers. It goes to a whole lot of things that we can do and I'm hoping that I have another term to try to continue to do this. This year or next year when this is implemented in the spring, will you evaluate how effective it was and maybe how to reform on that and see if you want to continue with it or even reduce the time a little more? Yes. We're always doing that. That's part of our continuous improvement cycle. We've already made some changes with the legislature and the use of the Keystone exams. We actually delayed that for everybody, but we eliminated for those who are in career and technical education. That was a bipartisan effort. It took legislation and, again, will continue to look at ways to blend accountability with relevance and excellence. To a certain extent, to a great extent, the legislature has a lot to say about that and there may be some things like that in the future. This is something we could do. We're continuing to look at how we can make sure that our schools are doing right by our parents and our students and will continue to do that throughout my administration. I can share specifically, just in regards to the graduation standards, what we're here discussing today is a culmination of thousands of stakeholders coming together and sharing feedback. In working with the governor to provide more holistic graduation standards, those recommendations are also a culmination of feedback from stakeholders. I think what we've been engaging with the General Assembly about is understanding their thoughts, their desires and concerns, while at the same time understanding the need to bring the education community together to make sure we're not making recommendations at the capitol that impacts classrooms every day without putting the support, the resources and time to develop an assessment in place that we're looking for. Yeah, absolutely. So if you couple this with recommendations that we're making around the future ready PA where we're not only looking at standardized tests as an achievement metric but also looking at growth, that will significantly ensure that educators in the classroom are providing intervention and enrichment for students. We're not only recommending looking at the PSSA moving forward under direction of the governor and the team has done an amazing job of doing level attainment, math level attainment, English language attainment for EL students or English language learners as well as meeting the needs of IEP students. So the measurement that the governor has tasked us with putting in place will look at student education, look at educational attainment more holistically, which will force this cultural change of focusing on a single standard measure to engage in sweeping change. So we're looking much more holistically and provide support for schools across the county. So it's hard to say different schools take different approaches but we believe that if we design the test appropriately, teachers shouldn't have to teach to the test that the assessments should naturally measure learning that's occurring in classrooms. And so again as we move forward here, we hope that we've taken a significant step forward in bringing the high levels of accountability while still having assessments that don't change cultures of schools but where schools can focus on teaching and learning and let the assessments just become a natural part of that process. So we would encourage districts to focus on teaching and learning and letting the assessments just naturally provide a snapshot of student achievement. And one of the things along those lines that I can share that hasn't been mentioned yet that's important is our calendar for this spring has been set already. So we don't change testing calendars because districts schedule around that but for the spring of 2019 because of these changes that we've made and really we have the opportunity to condense the testing windows so that they're not taking as much time as they are right now. So by condensing the windows we even hope to be able to move the assessments back further in the year to allow more natural instruction time prior to the assessments. And that's a big step for our teachers have made it very clear that they want to be able to naturally teach their core sequences and then have the assessments follow. So for spring of 2019 we should be able to move the assessments back and allow for the natural teaching and learning to happen. The natural teaching and learning should be to prepare them to be college and career ready and successful in all of their pursuits post-secondary when they graduate and the assessments should just provide snapshots so that our parents, teachers, community members can hold our schools accountable. Keep in mind how many test teachers are teaching too. They have the SATs or the ACTs whatever they're taking they have advanced placements they have international baccalaureates they have their own tests that they're making up and exams and papers that they have to grade. So the educational experience when I, a long time ago when I went to school and when my daughters went to public school in York County the teachers are always working on ways to figure out how their students are doing and so they're teaching to a variety of mechanisms to figure out how their students are doing. This is just one of them. One more question that I'll make Matt stick around to have any other questions you have on this topic. When you were talking about spring what are you talking about later in spring from 2019? I don't want to put specific dates out but let's just say we would be testing later several weeks later than we currently are again which will allow for more teaching and learning prior to taking the assessments. Correct. We're very early in April the PSSAs and we'd love to be able to push those back at least to, you know, later in the month if not further and we're excited about that. Sorry, I just had one more. How do you get school boards to agree to reduce the time to do it? It's really a local decision at a point in time. So how do you get them to tell their state board? When I shared through the creation of the ESSA plan we engaged with thousands of stakeholders and school board members had a seat at the table. So this is also, you know, them continuing to inform their constituents that this is a step in the right direction but they were one of the members that met with us and engaged and provide feedback around this plan moving forward.