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Attachment 15B – School Developed Assessments
Provide a description of the school-developed assessments that would be used by the charter school. As part of your
response, please indicate how these assessments would reliably and verifiably measure student performance and
achievement goals.
Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School strongly believes that instruction must be informed by
ongoing assessments in order to ensure its efficacy. Teachers cannot teach effectively if they do not know
what it is students already know and what it is they need to learn to reach mastery. We therefore employ two
types of school-developed assessments:
1) Classroom Quizzes
2) Interim Assessments
Classroom Quizzes:
These assessments, drawn from published textbooks or developed by teachers, are administered by teachers
on a weekly basis in order to gauge student mastery of material recently covered. The standards tested are
explicitly aligned with both the New York State Performance Standards and the school’s internal learning
standards. Quizzes take only a small part of a class period and enable teachers to efficiently and promptly
understand which students have mastered which aspects of material taught in the previous few classes.
Because the standards are aligned with New York State and school learning standards, these quizzes are a
reliable, ongoing way to ensure that students are making progress to overall mastery of the standards.
Because these assessments are designed and graded by individual teachers, their results are not a sufficiently
reliable and consistent means of comparing students within that classroom to students outside it. Results
from these quizzes will therefore not be used to support the school’s application for charter renewal.
Interim Assessments: 1
Interim Assessments are written assessments e administered in all academic classes every four to six weeks.
In grades kindergarten to second grade, these assessments draw heavily on existing diagnostic reading tests
such as the DIBELs. Beginning with third grade, assessments are designed collaboratively by teachers at each
grade level and subject area, during the curriculum-development period each summer. They measure how
fully the students have mastered the standards and objectives for the given interval. Designing the
assessments during the summer curriculum-development period ensures alignment with the standards, frees
teachers from having to develop ad hoc tests, and provides consistency for the school as a whole.
.
1 This process of systematic, standards-aligned assessment is based on the practices of North Star Academy, Roxbury
Prep, Amistad Academy, and Excellence Charter School of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School Charter School
Attachment 15(b)-1