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CCSD's Elliott Asp has a balanced view on CSAPs

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Contributed by: Julie Huun on 3/11/2008

Editor's note: Visit our Faces of South Metro page, where YourHub.com staff and readers can introduce you to more people who make this part of the metro area what it is.

Dr. Elliott Asp, the Cherry Creek School District Assistant Superintendent for Performance Improvement, is hoping a lot of kids are getting their sleep these days. The month of March is synonymous with CSAP exams. Students throughout the district are sharpening their No. 2 pencils for the series of standardized tests. The results of those tests will eventually end up on Asp's desk.

He is quick to joke that with a title like his, you better see some results. And the district's goals are not modest, despite the fact that students in the district typically test higher than the state average. CSAP tests are given to students beginning in the third grade and their scores put them in one of four categories: not proficient, partially proficient, proficient or advanced.

"We always want to increase the number of proficient students, and we want to close the achievement gap by 5 percent," said Asp, who explained that the achievement gap is the disparity between the achievement of white and Asian students and African American and Latino students. That gap is as high as 30 percent in the increasingly diverse district. A district-wide goal, according to Asp, is to narrow the achievement gap by seeing improvement by all students.

Much of Asp's life has been dedicated to leading educators down the long and sometimes torturous road of assessment and achievement. He has worked in administration in both the Littleton and Douglas County school districts since receiving his Ph.D. in Educational Administration from Penn State University. But his interest in adolescents and human development take away any shred of pretense. He speaks fondly of his time teaching junior high at the Air Academy in Colorado Springs and of his 20-year-old daughter who has special needs.

The meatiest part of Asp's job isn't in figuring out test scores, it is in setting goals and meeting with teams that are in the schools evaluating such things as curriculum, technology and teaching strategies.

Asp has a balanced viewpoint when it comes to the debate over the value of CSAP exams. He cautions that teaching to the test can leave schools without rich curriculums and without the teaching strategies that develop critical thinkers and problem solvers. But he defends the CSAP exam as a common measurement device to compare achievement in different schools and to track individual student achievement over time.

Asp also discourages parents from choosing a school based solely on CSAP scores.

"I encourage them to think about what a school feels like, to ask themselves if they would want to be there and if they think that school will care about their kids' needs," he said. "They should also ask about all the programs available at a school.".

Even with a head full of statistics on CSAP scores, Asp knows that it is only one tool in the box of knowledge. He knows that making sure that box gets opened for every child is a far loftier goal than an advanced score on the CSAP exam.

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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Julie Huun

Englewood , CO

Julie Huun has posted 8 stories and 0 comments since joining on 3/15/2007. Julie Huun 's average story rating is 5.

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