SEATTLE — It’s education testing season in Washington and across the nation, but this year many public school students will be trying out a new kind of test that will eventually help school officials compare student achievement across the nation.
Nearly 40 percent of children in grades three through eight and about 10 percent of ninth, 10th and 11th grade students will be participating in a field test in Washington of the new national exams.
Across the nation, 24 states, representing 39 percent of K-12 students in the nation or about 3 million students at about 20,000 schools will be helping the Smarter Balanced coalition test the new exams, between March 25 and June 6.
About 180 schools in the state are expected to participate in the exercise.
Less than a third of students across the nation will be tested, but that will be enough to help the coalition determine which test questions are working and which aren’t, which questions are hard enough, but not too hard, explained Joe Willhoft, executive director of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
“This is a test of the test, not a test of the students,” he said.
The former Washington education official — he helped run the WASL and track how students were doing — said five states are testing all of their students on the new exams: California, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota.
States will also learn something from the exercise, such as whether they have the right computer equipment and Internet bandwidth to enable everyone to take the online test, Willhoft said.
The new tests are designed to test how well students are learning the new national academic standards known as the “common core.” Almost every state, including Washington, has made a commitment to adopt the common core standards for math and English language arts.
Washington teachers and their union have expressed concern about both the new education standards and the new tests, saying they need more time to get used to the new program before they are judged on how well their students are doing.
The Washington Education Association used this argument to object to plans by lawmakers to require teacher evaluations to include data from statewide student tests, since they say it will take years to implement the new curriculum and get used to the new tests.
