Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Key Common Core test rebounds from last year’s technical disaster

Smarter Balanced test

One of Nevada’s major proficiency exams turned into a nightmare in 2015, as technical problems allowed only a handful of students to complete it. This year is a different story.

Around this time last year, Nevada’s new Common Core test had only succeeded at being broken.

Due to the testing company's technical problems, schools were thrown into chaos for weeks as teachers and staff struggled to get the computer-based Smarter Balanced test to work for the thousands of third- through eighth-graders required to take it.

Fast-forward to this year, and the situation has almost completely reversed.

As of May 31, the end of the testing period, just under 150,000 students had taken the test in Clark County. Officials in the Clark County School District, affected the most by last year’s problems, say they are confident that more than 95 percent of eligible students successfully completed it. That’s 90 percent more than were able to last year.

“We’re smiling this year, let’s put it that way,” said Tiffany Seibel, CCSD’s director of assessment. Early signs were pointing to a much better showing for the test this year, but the official numbers mean administrators can finally breathe easy.

The Smarter Balanced test assesses students’ mastery of English and math skills set out in the Common Core, and is mandated by the federal government to ensure schools are doing a good job of educating students. But due to last year’s issues, officials were unable to collect that information.

On the state level, a school’s test scores are used to help generate its one-to-five star ranking. Those rankings could not be updated for 2016. What’s more, the number of students who did complete the test last year wasn’t enough to satisfy the federal government’s requirement, and Nevada could have lost federal funding had the state not received a waiver.

The problems themselves were the result of poor planning on the part of Measured Progress, the testing company that the state then dumped in favor of a larger vendor, McGraw Hill. In the middle of the contract process, McGraw Hill’s testing division was bought by Data Recognition Corporation, and officials had to scramble to build up a working relationship with the company at the same time it was rolling out a replacement for the state’s old High School Proficiency Exam.

“It was a complete unknown,” said Peter Zutz, the state’s director of assessment, data and accountability. “All of that with a new vendor in such a short amount of time ... the fact that we pulled it off in one year speaks a lot.”

This year’s Smarter Balanced testing was not without its own glitches, however. Districts complained about some organizational issues as well as minor technical problems, most of which were solved by DRC’s support desk, Seibel said. An hour-and-a-half server outage in early May was the most significant, a drop in the bucket compared to the outages that halted testing last year.

“It’s night and day,” Seibel said.

Zutz said the biggest problem for state education officials came from the difficulty of conducting computerized tests in rural areas. In a number of the 19 rugged counties in the Silver State, a lack of modern computers and spotty internet connectivity has long plagued schools.

The test results now have to be analyzed by DRC. At the moment, the state anticipates it will receive the results in August.

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