TESTING FAILURE

Maine education officials knew the state would flunk federal testing requirements when it switched to the SAT last year. Now that it has formally been informed of its failing grade – and an accompanying $114,000 fine – the state is asking the federal Education Department to reconsider. Reconsidering Maine’s choice of tests, since revising the SAT in time for next year’s exam season seems a long shot, would be more prudent.

Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron last year dropped the traditional Maine Educational Assessment for the SAT for the state’s 11th-graders because she said it would put more students on track to go to college. Perhaps she will be proved right, and perhaps she will be right in saying that Maine can demonstrate that the SAT meets the requirement that it align with the state Learning Results standards.

So far, however, the federal government isn’t swayed by the state’s rationale. Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced Maine was not in compliance with No Child Left Behind testing standards and would be fined the maximum allowed because the department doesn’t expect the state to be in compliance next year either. Only one other state, Nebraska, was also not in compliance.

The Maine Department of Education has appealed the federal designation, asking to be labeled “Approval Pending” rather than “Non-Approved.”

A major problem is that the SAT is a test that predicts a student’s likely performance rather than, as NCLB demands, one that assesses what they have learned. In addition, it has not aligned with the subject matter Maine deemed important in its Learning Results. After the federal Education Department found an assessment by the College Boards of the SAT and Learning Results to show inadequate alignment, Maine hired its own expert, Norman Webb, senior research scientist with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, to review the question. He found the test to be “partially aligned” with the Learning Results in language arts. For math, major improvements would be required, he found. The state went ahead with the SAT anyway.

Now it is stuck. It already has a year of testing that is judged not in compliance. It has limited time to show how it might augment the SAT to make up for shortcomings; it has no clear sense of what will happen if the feds reject the state’s additional evidence.

Because the Legislature gave her the authority to switch to the SAT, Commissioner Gendron has handled the situation on her own. It is time for the Legislature’s Education Committee to review the situation rather than rely on the commissioner’s assurances that everything will be OK.

The committee should fully assess whether Maine can meet federal testing requirements through the SAT. This is especially important because the switch to the SAT is a major shift away from measuring student performance against state-developed standards. The committee should also want to know how much the switch to the SAT – including alignment studies, staff time to respond to federal officials, adding questions to the exam, and, now the federal fine – is costing the state.

If the costs exceed the benefits and the success of the project remains in doubt, an alternative needs to be developed.