Oregon’s Smarter Balanced Assessment Scores Drop

Oregon schools showed a drop in proficiency in math and ELA as last school year’s Smarter Balanced Assessment scores were released.

The World reported:

Local school districts saw a slight decrease in overall scores compared to the year before. In the new scores, most didn’t exceed or come close to 50 percent proficiency, according to  results from Oregon’s Smarter Balanced assessments for the 2016-2017 school year.

“We have an important opportunity, through the Oregon Plan under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, to focus on providing a culturally relevant, well-rounded education for every student,” State Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Salam Noor said in a press release from the Oregon Department of Education.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is standardized state testing that helps create common core state standards. It tests third through eighth grade levels and high school on math, science, and the English Language Arts.

“We are confident that as we work with school and district leaders to implement the Oregon Plan, we will see more students attending school regularly, more students graduating and more scoring in the proficient category on these assessments,” Noor said.

Across Oregon, SBAC scores showed fewer students being proficient in English Language Arts (ELA) and math.

Surprise… Surprise… Surprise… Oregon adopted the Common Core State Standards in 2010 and fully implemented them by the 2014-2015 school year. A drop in proficiency when they switched to Smarter Balanced from the previous OAKS assessment, but the decline is reflected in concurrent years taking Smarter Balanced.

The standard response would be to give the standards and the assessment more time to make a difference in student achievement. The problem is that we are not seeing that student achievement increase anywhere else as a result of Common Core, at least not when you look at say Kentucky’s ACT scores. Kentucky was the first state to implement Common Core. Oregon’s ACT scores also look relatively stagnant over the last five years as well.

However, give it time, the magic silver bullet of education reform is soon to make its impact I am sure.