After our post of May 4th, even more students have opted out of the Smarter Balanced Assessments which align with the Common Core Standards. Students, parents, and teachers are not quietly accepting the new Smarter Balanced Assessments which have no track record, rob students of countless hours of school time, and squeeze out other subjects which are not in the Common Core Standards.

Bellingham students have opted out by the hundreds. See the article.

Also, students in University Place’s Curtis High School are opting out, many citing testing overload as the reason. Read about University Place here.

Diane Ravitch, education researcher, posted on her blog a resolution by teachers in Everett, Washington, disapproving of the Smarter Balanced Assessments.

King 5 News did a story on the wave of opt outs in the Puget Sound area.

We hope the education policy-makers are watching and listening.

As in previous posts, we repeat, the Smarter Balanced Assessments are NOT STANDARDIZED, even though the media, administrators, and legislators use the term.  For one thing, the assessment is adaptive. They explain on their website:  Based on student responses, the computer program adjusts the difficulty of questions throughout the assessment. For example, a student who answers a question correctly will receive a more challenging item, while an incorrect answer generates an easier question.

You can see that each student is receiving a different set of questions. If each student is taking a different assessment, how can that be called  standardized?

Please read more about the difference between “standardized tests” and “assessments” in our commentary, “Lies, Damn Lies, and the Myth of ‘Standardized’ Tests.”