ALEXANDRIA, Va. – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of education leaders Thursday that a federally funded overhaul of K-12 assessment tests will substantially improve the understanding parents and teachers will have in how well schoolchildren are progressing in their studies and becoming college and workforce ready.
“Today is the day that marks the beginning of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America’s schoolchildren,” Duncan told educators and advocates from around the country attending the American Diploma Project Network leadership team meeting held in Alexandria, Va., this week. “I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game changer in public education.”
Duncan’s remarks centered around a Thursday morning announcement that the Department of Education awarded two state coalitions, representing 44 states and the District of Columbia, approximately $330 million in federal funds for the development of K-12 assessment systems aligned to the common core state standards in English, language arts and mathematics. The Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) received grants in the amount of $170 million and $160 million, respectively.
The new tests will be available for the 2014-15 school year. The assessments, which also will be made available to states that do not participate in a consortium, will cover all students in grades three through eight and will be used at least once in high school. They will measure students’ ability to analyze and solve complex problems, synthesize information and other higher-order thinking and communication skills.
“For the first time, millions of schoolchildren, parents and teachers will know if students are on track for colleges and careers and if they are ready to enter college without the need for remedial instruction,” said Duncan. He added that current assessments have helped to identify achievement gaps but focus on easy-to-measure concepts and provide too little useful information too late—most often after school is out for the summer.
“Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact and designed to indicate only whether students have learned. Not enough is being done to assess students’ thinking as they learn to boost and enrich learning and track student growth,” Duncan observed. “Better assessments, given earlier in the school year, can better measure what matters: growth in student learning. And teachers will be empowered to differentiate instruction in the classroom, propelling the continuous cycle of improvement in student learning that teachers treasure.”
The education secretary noted that existing assessments are just part of the problem and that the academic standards to which they are pegged must be equally rigorous. He believes that, in the last decade, many states have “dummied down” both their academic standards and assessments.
