Do the Smarter Balanced Assessments Help Your Child Get Into College?

Like the counterculture era soul song, “War,” sung by Edwin Starr, the Smarter Balanced Assessments get people riled enough to ask a key question: “What is it good for?” Whereas you may be of the opinion that the war is good for “absolutely nothing,” it’s difficult to assign the same value to something so relatively new like the Smarter Balanced Assessments. These are tests that are supposed to, according to www.smarterbalanced.org, accomplish the following:

• Accurately describe student achievement and growth of student learning; and

• Provide valid, reliable, and fair measures of students’ progress toward, and attainment of the knowledge and skills required to be college and career-ready.

As an educator, I’ve always been reticent to hold in high esteem an examination that is not somehow tied to college admission requirements. This was my beef, so to speak, with the California Standards Tests. It has only been a few years since these examinations went the way of the dinosaur, but if you recall these standards tests were used merely to qualify and compare schools across CA on the basis of overall student results. The lone positive in my mind was the ability to determine which demographic groups at a school fared the best, and which fared the worst. The CA standards test allowed school officials to have powerful conversations with their staffs about performance equity and access to the curriculum. Over the years, some schools made headway, closing the achievement gap that exists between their low-socioeconomic and minority students, and their Asian and White student counterparts. Others made no headway at all. Still others took a turn for the worse, being unable to stop the achievement gap from widening.

Like the state standards tests, each state’s Smarter Balanced Assessments (CA’s version is called the CA Assessment of Student Performance and Progress or CA.A.S.P.P.) will attempt to present teachers, administrators, and parents, with a gauge on students’ abilities to read and respond to questions that check understanding of text. The SBA is more robust, however. A student, for example, will also have to demonstrate their ability to write, listen, and even research! And in the case of math, with the SBA students will not only have to problem solve, but they’ll also need to be able to demonstrate knowledge of mathematical procedures, data analysis, and most notably, communicate their mathematical reasoning in writing. Thus, truly the SBA will “provide…measures of students’ progress toward, and attainment of the knowledge and skills required to be college and career-ready.” Still, there is a major problem with the SBA.