Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

State education department threatening legal action against Common Core test company

Magnet School

L.E. Baskow

Students work on a design project in the Rancho High School Academy of Aviation magnet program Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015.

For the third day in a row, Nevada students were once again unable to take standardized tests due to ongoing technical issues with the state’s testing company — and education officials are out for blood.

In a statement today, state Superintendent Dale Erquiaga said he plans to meet with Attorney General Adam Laxalt to “discuss the Department (of Education's) legal remedies” against Measured Progress, the company the state pays to conduct its testing.

The company’s servers weren’t enough to handle students taking the state’s new Common Core test in Nevada, Montana and North Dakota this week. The outage started Tuesday morning and still hadn't been fixed by Thursday.

Measured Progress has said they are in the process of stress-testing new servers and hope testing will be back to normal on Monday. Limited testing could resume Friday, according to the state education department.

“We had expected minor issues to come with the decision to move to computer-based testing, but the problems we are facing this week are unacceptable,” Erquiaga said in a statement. “Out of respect for our educators and students, and to preserve the integrity of the state’s assessment system, our test vendor needs to be accountable for this setback.”

The test, called the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC), is not taken with pen and paper like past standardized tests. It requires a computer and Internet connection and is “computer adaptive,” meaning questions become more or less difficult to better assess students’ strengths and weaknesses.

This is the first year the SBAC has been administered and is being used to assess Nevada’s third- through eighth-graders in reading and math. It's meant to test students' aptitude onCommon Core standards, which have been implemented in many states in recent years to considerable controversy.

“It is unfortunate that technical problems are clouding the value of this new assessment to Nevada’s families and educators,” Erquiaga said. “Many Nevadans worked hard over the last few years through the state’s membership with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop an assessment that provides a valid and reliable measure of student achievement.”

The testing window for the SBAC started on March 30. So far, around 14 percent of Nevada students have completed the test.

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