States Developing Test For National Standards
Hawaii is in one of two state groups that won a total of $330 million in federal Race to the Top funds Thursday for the development of national tests. The tests could be used in schools as soon as the 2014-15 school year.
The funds, distributed by the , are for the development of a common test that will align with the , which have been ratified by 35 states and the District of Columbia. The standards are intended to provide consistent expectations of students in every state for every grade level. Their matching tests will be ready for use by the 2014-15 school year, said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in issued Thursday.
The 31-state SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, of which Hawaii is a member, will receive approximately $160 million of the federal funds to develop a testing system that balances cumulative and formative test scores to give the most accurate picture of each student’s success. The coalition plans to develop a computer adaptive test that will ask students tailored questions based on their previous answers. The group will also create a series of interim tests to assess whether students are on track during the school year.
Ideally, the new tests will mesh with the Hawaii Hawaii Department of Education‘s new Data for School Improvement system, which is an online dashboard that will track everything about each student, from grades by subject area and whether he/she is on track to graduate, to whether the student is at-risk.
The 26-state Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, the second state consortium, will receive $170 million to develop a test that will test students on complex texts, research projects, classroom speaking, listening and digital media skills.
“These are not pilot projects,” said Duncan in a speech Thursday. “These are not discrete tests, cobbled together. The winning consortia will be designing and implementing comprehensive assessment systems in math and English language arts. More than 35 million students are in public school in the states participating in the two consortia — and states not participating in a consortium are free to use the assessments.”
Collaboration will save all of the participating states money because they will share development resources, said Kent Hinton, administrator of the Student Assessments Section of the Hawaii education department.
Participation in the new tests will be optional, but the more states that use them, the easier it will be to compare student achievement across state lines — something that up to now has been virtually impossible. Many states have historically relied on the to determine how their students and schools are doing in comparison with national averages.
“We will replace our current test with the common test,” said Cara Tanimura, director of the education department’s Systems Accountability Office. “We’re going to have to agree on the cut scores, we’re going to have to agree on proficiency standards, but at the same time, we will be able compare the results across multiple states. It will be like NAEP or like the SAT.”
Only maybe more accurate, because the NAEP has its weaknesses: It is administered only once every two years to just a sampling of students in three grades — 4, 8 and 12. And every state has — until recently — been teaching to its own set of educational standards that may have had little in common with the national test’s expectations. This, the educators say, is why the new national tests are necessary.
“With the Common Core, you will have everybody teaching to the same standards,” said Hinton.
