Maine’s Department of Education recently announced that it progressed from failing to get approval for its student-assessment system to having approval pending, a step toward making the SAT – a test high-schoolers take to predict how well they will do in their first year of college – part of its assessment. It is a positive step in that it shows both the state and federal governments willing to cooperate when setting standards for education, but that is still a long way from demonstrating all students are learning at a high level.

Maine was penalized by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year, losing 25 percent of about $450,000 in administrative funding, because of its failure to construct a plan under No Child Left Behind that was acceptable to Washington. With the improvement to “pending approval,” that penalty was reduced to 10 percent. In both cases, the money lost to Maine state administration would be sent to Maine school districts.

Besides not meeting federal standards for an 11th-grade assessment with the SAT, Maine is also out of compliance with alternative assessments for students with disabilities in grades three, five, six and seven, and has yet to demonstrate its tests align with curriculum in grades three through eight. Many states have similar challenges, and Maine could meet federal standards by the end of the year if all goes well.

The change to the SAT, however, creates the most concern because it uses the test in a new way – instead of looking forward to what a student can do, it is being used here to look back at what a student has learned. Maine is the only state in the nation to use the test for this purpose, and it obtained pending approval from federal officials only by adding 20 more questions in math, in the areas of data, statistics and probability.

Federal officials have yet to see these questions, but assuming Maine can persuade them the augmented test meets federal standards, Education Commissioner Sue Gendron must also show that the previous two years and an enormous amount of department time given over to this change has produced substantial and prolonged improvements in student learning. That would mean in this case a better gauge of what students had learned and an increase in college attendance above the increase that would have been expected without the new assessment.

Those results will take a couple of years to come in, but they should be followed closely because in an increasingly competitive world, education is one area in which Maine can’t afford to be wrong.