Iowa schools may join nationwide testing standard

Iowa school children may soon take the same standardized tests as their counterparts in California, Maine, Michigan and more than two dozen other states.

The states are part of a coalition working toward a nationwide testing standard by the 2014 school year.

Iowa Board of Education President Rosie Hussey and Gov. Terry Branstad have signed off on a proposal from Department of Education Director Jason Glass to make Iowa one of the governing states of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Coalition.

The coalition is one of two in the country using federal government money to develop a nationwide assessment standard. The coalition claims 30 full- and part-member states. The other coalition, called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers claims 25 members. The overlap is because several states are partial or advisory members in both systems.

“They're going to have to pick one or the other by the end of the year,” said Chris Barron, a spokesman for Smarter Balanced. “That's the way it's set up. So you'll have two systems in place for a few years while they work though the differences.”

Five states - Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia - have so far not signed up for either system.

The goal of both systems is to align testing assessments to what's called the Common Core. The Common Core is a set of national standards endorsed by the National Governor's Association. Iowa has officially adopted the Common Core, but its tests aren't completely aligned to core goals.

The main difference between the systems, said Barron, is how the tests are delivered. Smarter Balanced is more technology-heavy while Partnership for Assessment is more traditional in nature, using pencils and fill-in-the-bubble sheets.

“This signals a significant change in Iowa's history,” Glass said. “Iowa is the birthplace of standardized testing and we're moving to a new model for the first time in 70 years.”

As a governing state, Iowa officials now have a vote as the standards and the testing mechanisms develop. In exchange, the state committed what Glass called a “soft promise” that Iowa would adopt the standards once they are approved.

“It means we'll go to the table with an open mind and the intention of approving them, but that if they end up being something we can't agree to, we don't have to,” he said.

Glass said one of the key ideas behind Smarter Balanced he liked is the progressive, computer-based test.

In traditional pencil-and-paper assessment tests, a student is given a series of questions that grow progressively more difficult.

In the Smarter Balanced model - which uses a computer delivery system - the degree of difficulty depends upon a student's previous answer. If the student gets the question correct, they get another that is more difficult. If the student gets the question incorrect, they'll get a question of a similar level of difficulty as the one they had wrong.

“The tests of two people sitting together will be totally different,” Glass said. “That will cut down on cheating as well.”

For now, however, the test is still a work in progress. Barron said the assessment is expected to be ready for the 2013-14 school year.

In the meantime, Glass said some school districts in the state might be pilot sites for computer testing next school year or the following one, but those have yet to be determined.

“One of the real advantages to this is we will have an assessment that can measure not only how we are doing in our state, but compared to the other states,” Glass said. “We don't really have that now.”