Maine was part of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Students took the online tests. Complaints from students, parents, and teachers were so loud that the legislature dropped out of SBAC.
Now the the results are in, and no one knows what to make of them since they are not comparable with previous tests.
Many students opted out. The state average of opt outs averaged more than 10%, but in some schools more than 50% did not take the tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the article “The Department of Education says some low participation rates could have resulted in part from technical problems, such as when some classes mistakenly administered the wrong test.”
Another example of why test mania is screwing up education.
The entire focus is on the Common Core test scores in my state. Once again, testing has completely consumed everything in its path, in this case “The Common Core Standards” which parents were promised were a much bigger idea than standardized testing:
“At this week’s meeting of the state board of education, board members accepted Ohio Department of Education (ODE) recommendations on cut scores that will designate roughly 60–70 percent of Ohio students as proficient (based on the 2014–15 administration of PARCC). While this represents a decline of about fifteen percentage points from previous years’ proficiency rates, it isn’t the large adjustment needed to align with a “college-and-career-ready” definition of proficiency. In fact, this new policy will maintain, albeit in a less dramatic way than before, the “proficiency illusion”—the misleading practice of calling “proficient” a large number of students who aren’t on-track for success in college or career.”
If ed reform isn’t solely focused on test scores, why do they (repeatedly, despite claims to the contrary) solely focus on test scores? We were told again and again that the testing wasn’t the be-all and end-all of the Common Core standards, yet the exact same thing is happening, again, and it’s all about test scores.
It’s NCLB all over again. What happened to all the wonderful deep instruction and nuance and support public schools were supposed to get in return for these tests? Where is that? Why do we always get the tests and then the promised upside never appears?
http://edexcellence.net/articles/ohio-should-set-the-bar-at-%E2%80%9Ccollege-and-career-ready%E2%80%9D
For the past three years, I have been warning my colleagues that CC$$ testing would set the real standards and it will become all about test scores. The worst of all worlds; bad standard and test driven curriculum.
Susan Collins and Bernie Sanders presented an amendment to ESEA partly because Maine is preparing innovative assessment in lieu of the test. More power to them
The Department of Education is saying that this was a “learning experience”. The learning experience cost the taxpayers of Maine $3.5 million hard earned dollars– plus the time the testing took away from the students’ education.
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Good! May the OPT OUT movment continue and reign.
I’m jealous of the Northeast. We only had 1% opting out in California. Monica Garcia on the LA Broad of Ed keeps calling us “the cradle of reform” and if parents here don’t wake up, that’s exactly what we will be! …how to educate parents without being targeted…
As Maine goes, so goes the nation.
Everyone notice the age of the computer monitors in the photo with the news story? Late ’90’s maybe?
The test results aren’t just not comparable with previous years’, but with subsequent ones as well. Maine terminated the Smarter Balanced contract after just the one year and only last week put out the RFP for the 2015-16 test.
Not only are the 2014-15 results “not comparable to previous years”, they won’t be to subsequent ones either. The Smarter Balanced contract was terminated after just one and the RFP for a new assessment was only released last week.
On another point, many Maine schools decided to employ iPads for their MLTI one-to-one technology “solution” when that option became available. The SB test could not be done in those, so schools had to scramble to find enough desktops or laptops to use (and hope the students remembered how).
Finally, because Maine has so many small schools, there is lots of missing data at the school reporting level as posted on the DoE site