New school year to be capped with new test

Gwinnett – Aug. 5

DeKalb – Aug. 11

APS – Aug. 4

As students across Georgia head back to school, the state Department of Education is stepping up its preparation of the new standardized test they’ll take this spring.

Over the next couple of weeks, Georgia educators will begin reviewing the new test, which will be called Georgia Milestones.

Getting it reading in time will be a tough task, one state education officials insist will be completed. The test itself, which will be harder and will require more writing from students, needs to be finalized. New security and grading procedures need to be established. And the new test could be changed as late as December if, as expected, the state Board of Education makes changes to the Common Core academic standards to which Georgia adheres.

Gov. Nathan Deal ordered the board to review Common Core, seen by some conservatives and tea party activists as a federal intrusion into state control of public education. That review could lead to changes to Common Core, which, in turn, would lead to changes on Georgia Milestones because the test is pegged to the standards.

“Testing will always follow the standards that are used as the basis of instruction in the classroom,” said Melissa Fincher, associate superintendent for assessment and accountability at the state Department of Education. “Should the state board adopt changes, the tests will be adjusted to reflect those changes and will follow the implementation timeline that the state board determines. At no time will students be instructed on one set of standards and tested on another.”

Georgia Milestones replaces the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, which was administered in Georgia for 14 years.

Georgia had been working with a group of other states to develop a new standardized test that would be administered in all of the states in the group. But after deciding that test would be too expensive, Georgia officials left the group and moved forward with plans to develop their own test.

Some have argued it was a mistake to pull out of the group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.

“I think that’s the dumbest thing,” said Natasha Stark, an assistant research director who lives in Fulton County where her daughter is a rising sixth-grader. “That’s symptomatic of what’s wrong in Georgia. They don’t want to fund anything.”

Because Georgia won’t be administering the PARCC test, it won’t be possible to directly compare the overall results of students here to the results of those in PARCC.

Fincher said Georgia is sharing some test items with Kentucky and could share information with other states as well. She also noted that Georgia Milestones will be norm-referenced, a term educators use to describe a test that determines if students performed better or worse than other students.

The CRCT was criterion-referenced, meaning its results showed how well students mastered academic material.

Bruce Kendall, a U.S. Army retiree in Henry County whose son graduated in May, said he is uncomfortable with comparing the test results of students because he fears students will “segregated and profiled” instead of given targeted assistance.

Still, he said Georgia should have remained in PARCC.

“We could compare apples to apples at least in the states that are participating,” he said.

Bradford Swan, director of StudentsFirst Georgia, a group that advocates more choices in public education, said he understands the decision to move away from PARCC.

“While remaining in PARCC would have given Georgia the benefit of comparing our students to those in other states, it ultimately wasn’t viable,” Swan said. “Milestones was the next-best option, and it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where we’ve been.”