The New Assessments
Last week, as part of the Race to the Top federal grant competition, the Education Department awarded two groups of states $330 million to develop the next generation of student assessments. The money, which will be disbursed over the next four years, goes to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Together the winning groups represent 44 states; the others have declined to participate. The forthcoming assessments are the counterpart to the common standards in English and math that the administration is pushing states to adopt.
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, both of the winning applicants will develop evaluation systems that avoid pressuring teachers "to teach to a test that doesn't measure what really matters." Instead, Duncan maintains, the assessments will "measure real student knowledge and skills."
Given the information available from the applicants' proposals, does one group hold more promise than the other for delivering superior assessments? Will the new assessments succeed in Duncan's promise to measure real student knowledge and skills?
-- Eliza Krigman, NationalJournal.com
RESPONDED ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 10:23 AM
While Waiting For The New Tests...
I am hoping that the new assessments will be better than the current crop of standardized tests. Many people (including Secretary Arne Duncan) agree that the current standardized tests are inadequate, that learning bubble-guessing is not a good use of students' time, and that we need tests that