Seattle Schools Community Forum

The WEA did a survey of schools that field tested the Smarter Balanced assessments .  The highest score - on a 1-4 scale - was "alignment with Common Core."  That came in at 2.65. The lowest was a 1.72 for "Overall Impact of SBAC Practice and Administration on the School Day." 50% (!) of member respondents said it 11-20+ hours for student to take the test. Also SB had an estimate of how long it would take students to complete tests in various subjects.  Most respondents said it was about one hour more than estimated.  (Learning curve?) But when asked what were challenges to students in taking the LA test, the biggest one was "keyboarding skills" followed by " test screen - split screen, navigation, scrolling." For math, the biggest student issues were "test tools - fractions, calculator, graphs, formulas), followed by "difficult, above grade level." The biggest concern for teachers was "Schedule disruptions, ...

Two major stories have come across the wire in the last 24 hours about Common Core.  One school district in Massachusetts, Worcester, says that parents can opt out of field testing for the Common Core assessment.   (There are two groups creating assessments.  One is PARCC and the other is Smarter Balanced; Washington State belongs to the latter.) From MASS Live : Thursday night, the Worcester School Committee decided to allow parents of Worcester Public Schools students selected to take the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) pilot test to say that they want their children to participate in regular classroom instruction or other education-based activities during that time. Committee members Brian O'Connell and Dianna Biancheria said that parents should have the ability to decide whether their children should participate in the test. O'Connell added that the administration of the test is taking "a block of time away from a...