Education Week reports that Oregon is dropping the Smarter Balanced Assessment for high school students and will use the SAT instead. Oregon will continue to use SBAC for testing 3-8 and 11.
The SAT is a college admissions test, and it is wildly inappropriate to use it as an accountability test. It is a test of reading, mathematics, and writing. It does not test the curriculum that students have studied. It is norm-referenced and preordained that many children will fail, who will be mostly students who are poor, students with disabilities, and students whose English skills are weak.
As even the College Board knows, the SAT reflects family income.
The cardinal rule of psychometric is that a test should be used only for the purpose for which it was designed. The SAT was designed as a college admissions test. It comes close to being an IQ test, which are its roots in the history of testing. It was not designed as a test for all high school students, either for accountability or for graduation.
Oregon is making another costly mistake. This one will hurt the most vulnerable students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
STUPID!
Yes, STUPID. But where there’s BIG money, politicians don’t care. All politicians care about are their bank account and their perks. Politicians are OUT OF TOUCH and the citizens of this country have been Common Cored and Tested and the result is non-thinkers.
Thus, SLOGANS and PALTERING reign.
Click to access psp-pspi0000081.pdf
https://hbr.org/2016/10/theres-a-word-for-using-truthful-facts-to-deceive-paltering
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/12/29/when-telling-the-truth-is-actually-dishonest/?utm_term=.9dc76b3fdca7
Will students pay for the test themselves? What if your college choice does not require the SAT? Will you still graduate if you say no?
Better move to CA where Gov. Brown removed ALL testing for graduation. There is NO high school exit exam for 2 years.
Everyone gets a high school diploma.
Given out like candy.
Here in Maryland, student have to be College and Career Ready (just use CCR, please) to graduate.
How do kids demonstrate CCR? SAT, Accuplacer, ACT, PARCC….
Lots of costly mistakes. But, hey, we are one of the best states, so we must be doing something right.
“As even the College Board knows, the SAT reflects family income.”
And SBAC doesn’t ?
All standardized tests reflect family income
Who on earth is making these stupid policies? Every norm-based standardized test is created to stack-rank students and to garantee “failures.”
“Dollars and sense”
Makes no sense
But lots of dollars
Seeking rents
Instead of scholars
Mission accomplished!
David Coleman just assured his $900k per year salary and benefits as head of College Board for a few more years.
This is what CT uses for all 11th graders to grade/rank/priorotize the schools. It is a travesty.
What is Oregon using the test for? As a parent I appreciate that my state uses the ACT for the 11th grade assessment so that I don’t have to pay for my child to take it (at least directly), and we kill two birds with one stone (state requirement + college requirement). For those who think that there’s already too much testing in the schools, maybe a college admissions test isn’t so bad. This way, kids who might not have applied for college are one step closer to being able to apply.
ACT is a college admission test and should never be used as a graduation test or an accountability measure
Is it being used as a graduation test? I guess I’m skeptical of most accountability measures. Is the SBAC particularly good at measuring what it’s intended to measure, or has Oregon replaced a poor assessment with a worse one (that may have practical benefits to families)?
As for cost, using the SAT or ACT may cost the state less than developing and administering their own assessment (I don’t know the figures).
“For those who think that there’s already too much testing in the schools, maybe a college admissions test isn’t so bad.”
Putting lipstick on a pig won’t make it fly.
From your 12:24 comment, smason:
“Is the SBAC particularly good at measuring what it’s intended to measure. . . ”
Ummm, NO! The SBAC and all standardized tests aren’t good at measuring anything because what’s intended to be is “non-observable” as one staunch test defender put it. Please read and comprehend what follows to understand just how ludicrous and risible it is to claim that “a test measures what it is intended to measure”.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Because there is no rebuttal/refutation!
Missouri has been using the ACT test for all juniors. What an expensive boondoggle.
The first year they demanded that schools abuse students with this test was the last year that I taught. I was supposed to be one of the proctors. I refused. Fortunately, the person overseeing the giving of the torture, oops I mean test, was a guidance counselor not an adminimal or else things probably would have gotten ugly. She knew my stance on the insane abuse of students through standardized testing so she quietly arranged for someone else to cover. She moved to an elementary school the next year, fed up with the administrative decrees and mandates and doing the job an adminimal should have been doing.
It’s just a hunch, but with all the money involved, I’d bet there are kickbacks involved in at least some of the decisions regarding statewide adoption of tests like SAT and ACT.
It’s really hard to believe that these decisions are being made on the merits of these tests – because there are none!
Don’t know about just how money influences the process. But think about it. Almost all of the legislators are college educated, meaning that they probably did “well”, scored high enough on those tests so that well, “everyone else should recognize that greatness and if they can’t handle the test they don’t deserve anything. I handled it and look where I am. So suck it up and just do it. Now where’d my moneybags, oops I mean lobbyist, go?”
It’s interesting that “old timers” at College Board are sounding the alarm on David Coleman — and choosing to leave rather than do his bidding.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-coleman/
And even his own mother can’t support his policies regarding SAT — and hence chooses to remain “mum” when the interviewer asks about her own decision as Bennington College President to make Bennington “test optional”.
Pretty sad when your own mother won’t stick up for you!
But maybe that’s where he got the idea that “Nobody gives a &%!t what you think or feel”.
Poor David.
Couple of items from the article:
“The standards have been fully adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia”
The map shows Missouri as fully adopting CCSS. Wrong, Missouri rejected them awhile back. And from UsNews . com “The latest states where Common Core’s become a casualty include Missouri, Maine and Ohio” and that was from 2015. How many more have dropped them? Seems like the writer of the article was reading a press release from the College Board or using outdated information and not being a journalist to check to see if that statement was true.
“Camara resigned in August 2013 to join the rival ACT after 19 years with the College Board. In his resignation letter, he told Coleman that the CEO’s “top-down prescription” for the redesign could jeopardize the validity of the exam.”
Hell, the exam has no validity whatsoever as proven by Noel Wilson in his seminal dissertation that has never been refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Ay ay ay!
You and I know that, but most people do not.
And what you or I say matters not, at any rate.
But when Coleman’s own “experts” raise doubts about the validity of their own tests, it is very likely to have an impact on College Board’s bottom line.
Coleman must be frantic to get people like Camera to shut up.
As an Oregonian, I’m unfortunately torn here. We used to waste 3 entire days for the entire school on SBAC – because arranging testing space and computers took over all grades 9-12. So it’s great to reduce from 3 days to 1.
Unfortunately, I concur with all the comments about this test – especially: It’s a college entry exam and should NOT be used to determine High School graduation.
Here in Oregon, our education department has a perfect storm: They have a single set of grad requirements (one size fits all – except special ed) AND now it relies on college entry. And guess what? We have a bad graduation rate…because they’ve manufactured it to be bad.
States with high graduation rates generally have several options for getting a diploma and those options reflect the many types of kids and types of living situations for those kids.
Instead, the Oregon Department of Education takes steps like this to ensure they are able to leverage continual crisis to continue to impose their own programs – and take all initiative out of the hands of districts and teachers.
Perhaps that would be okay if ODE was wise. But from the top down, their skilled educational bureaucrats – and that’s a pejorative term in their case.