Amid nationwide opt-outs of a new Common Core testing program, the trustees of the Lagunitas School District have launched a discussion about how to respond to California’s newest standardized test: the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Although the board has yet to take an official stance, it is poised to oppose the district’s participation.
“The billion-dollar boondoggle is actually hurting education,” said Richard Sloan, a longtime trustee. “It is a detriment to what we believe and value in education.”
The test is given to third through eighth graders and to eleventh graders, and requires about two week’s worth of preparation and execution. Criticism of the test has centered around its ability to accurately reflect student achievement and the fact that it is undertaken entirely on a computer or other device.
This week, over 160 students at Lagunitas began taking practice tests before the real deal next week. Already, there have been technical glitches. “It’s a lot of waste for kids,” said principal Laura Shain, who explained that crashes in the system throw off not only the students’ rhythm, but also the district’s resources. “They’re all geared up, ready to go, and then their computers start spinning.”
Situated in the heart of the San Geronimo Valley, Lagunitas has a long history of alternative education, reflected in its current Montessori and Open Classroom programs. The district overcame threats of sanctions that could have led to a state takeover in 2006, when the district fell short of standardized test-taking participation benchmarks set by the No Child Left Behind Act.
According to parents and officials present at the time, the state offered $45,000 in incentive money to increase student participation in the act’s frontispiece, called the Standardized Testing and Reporting, or STAR, program. It was an offer the district rejected, and none of the penalties threatened by the state were ever carried through.
Now, for many in the district, the Smarter Balanced Assessment represents the latest incarnation of the kind of standardized, high-stakes testing the school fought against nearly a decade ago. “We are at a moment in the history of our country where a pendulum could swing, or it could just peter out,” said Amy Valens, a former longtime teacher in the Open Classroom program who now advocates for the district. “This is the moment when we need to speak up.”
In recent months, Smarter Balanced has grabbed national headlines in response to a growing number of students, parents and teachers who have begun protesting and boycotting the test. According to the Seattle Times, eleventh-graders at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle refused en masse to show up for the test last week, a move echoed and applauded by other schools in the Northwest.
The test is billed as a method to track student performance in order to bring schools into alignment with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which was adopted and implemented in 2010 by nearly every state. The goal of the initiative, it claims, is to promote college and career readiness.
According to the deputy executive director of Smarter Balanced, Luci Willits, the test was an outgrowth of federal Race to the Top grants awarded by the Obama administration; it was developed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in order to provide states with a better form of standardized testing.
Ms. Willits noted that opt-outs of state tests are not new a phenomenon. “Tests are part of life,” she said. “What we focus on is educating the public on why testing is good.”
Aside from practical concerns over the test’s functionality, the brunt of the discussion in Lagunitas has focused on whether this type of testing assesses real educational achievement. “I have mixed feelings,” Lagunitas superintendent John Carroll said. “[Standardized testing] can give you a rough idea of an individual student’s competence in a specific subject, if it’s a good enough test. Whether that information is worth the time, energy and money, I’m not sure.”
Mr. Carroll said it remains unclear how the state will collect and collate data generated from Smarter Balanced, which this year entered into its first phase of measureable results. Likewise, it is not known how the test might penalize schools for substandard test scores or lack of participation.
Many have blasted the assessment for the amount of time it takes to complete, disrupting regular curricula for two weeks. “To have our students taken out of the classroom for even just a week is disruptive,” said Anita Collison, who teaches third and fourth grades in the Open Classroom program. “Their learning in the classroom isn’t happening.”
Shoreline Unified School District, the largest school district in West Marin, is experiencing similar difficulties.
“You end up budgeting a significant portion of your week,” said Matt Nagle, the principal of Shoreline’s West Marin/Inverness Elementary School.
Though Mr. Nagle believes Smarter Balanced only shows a small piece of the puzzle—“You need to have multiple measures to measure the progress of each student,” he said—he is optimistic that the test will be a major improvement over old standardized tests such as S.T.A.R.
He cited the test’s writing component—which evaluates both sentence and paragraph phrasing—as a new challenge for students to surmount. “We should show improvement next year, and it should guide how we teach,” Mr. Nagle said.
Parents have a right to opt their children out of state-mandated standardized testing. Under California Education Code, parents may submit a written request—via paper, email or otherwise—to a school administrator, who can allow them to reserve the right to opt their children out of tests that public schools are legally required to administer.
In turn, the law forbids district employees or representatives—like trustees—from soliciting or encouraging parents to opt out of assessment testing. It’s a sticking point Lagunitas trustees have been careful to underscore: regardless of the board’s view, parents should not feel pressured one way or the other in their decisions about their child’s participation in standardized testing. “There still are parents in this district that are going to want to take the test,” said trustee Denise Santa Cruz-Bohman. “Whatever their validation for that is, it needs to be recognized.”
Others at Lagunitas agree that assessment norms ought to be used as a tool to mark individual student progress within a district rather than as the state’s primary means for comparing progress across districts. Some have called for an alternative assessment that would ensure greater local control.
“Having standards in a district is essential,” said Jodie NewDelman, whose child attends the Montessori program. “I think that if we, as a district, created a learning record that was established and implemented in a very standardized way, then we could say that we’re already making those measurements.”
For now, trustees have directed Mr. Carroll to draft a resolution outlining their position, which will be introduced at next month’s board meeting. His work will build off the efforts of Ms. Valens, who has already written a preliminary list of policies for the board to follow.
“I do not think that our school board can be stopped from making a statement,” Ms. Valens said. “If this board at its next meeting makes a statement and puts that out into the stratosphere, it will be part of a much larger movement.”