Smarter Updates

Recently, the University of California at Los Angeles informed the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium it will no longer serve as our fiscal agent. Our three-year agreement ends on June 30, 2017. What does that mean? See the facts below. There will be no interruption in service to Smarter Balanced members. This is a behind-the-scenes administrative…

A new opinion piece by Scott Sargrad and Coleton Whitaker of the Center for American Progress highlights the fact that states that have maintained high standards and better assessments, like Smarter Balanced, have showed gains in the second year of score reporting. And most impressively, third-grade scores across the board are up. Those students have learned under higher standards since…

Washington became the second state to release a new online test score guide to help families and students better understand what scores mean. Information is available for Smarter Balanced tests in grades 3-8 and high school in math and English language arts. Earlier this year, California released its online score guide based on the California Assessment of Student Performance…

The Oregonian newspaper examined Smarter Balanced scores throughout the state and discovered four Oregon high schools that “outperformed the rest.” The reason? The schools’ dedication to teaching Common Core State Standards in math and English language arts. An excerpt of the story is below, and you can read the full version at The Oregonian’s website: Four Oregon high…

Esther Cepeda recently returned to the classroom after several years away. She wrote an opinion piece on annual standardized testing that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Aug. 27, 2016. Cepeda wrote that that she supports the need for annual testing and recent polling shows a strong majority of Americans feels the same way….

Education Next released its annual state of education poll, and testing performed well (as it did in 2015). Parents continued to strongly support high-quality assessments that accurately measure their children’s learning. Other findings involving assessments included: nearly 80 percent of respondents favoring yearly assessments, 73 percent supporting assessments that are comparable among states and school…

Late August traditionally starts the beginning of the reporting of state test scores, and that trend has continued in 2016. With the release of California’s CAASSP scores Wednesday (Aug. 24), six states using Smarter Balanced assessments have released scores, with most showing solid growth in 2016 from 2015, the first year that the Smarter Balanced…