By Bill Hanlon

Out of the 45 states that originally signed on to the two K-12 testing consortiums nationwide, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and PARCC, only about 15 remain. That should tell you something about the general confidence level in those tests. And it’s not surprising. When teachers don’t get information back until the following academic year, what good is that? And just the fact that students who take these tests with pencil and paper tend to score higher than those taking the test on computers demonstrates that these tests are not reliable. And remember: Nevada schools “earn” stars based on these test results.

Adding to other testing irregularities, in 2015 the state identified experts in math to help work on end-of-course exams that were being developed to be used as a marker for high school graduation. For those not up to date on that outcome, the Legislature has now dropped that particular requirement for graduation – and for good reason.

In a nutshell, the math experts told the Nevada Department of Education that there were huge issues with the “new” end-of-course exams as they were being developed. Initially, the state did not listen and moved forward, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars creating, administering, and grading the tests, while also causing a great loss of regular instructional time – not to mention frustration and morale issues.

When it became clear that the state superintendent and board were not listening to the concerns of their own experts, these same experts had the where-with-all to place their concerns and recommendations in writing and send them to the governor, state superintendent, State Board of Education, local superintendents and trustees. The state superintendent’s response to the concerns was to insinuate that the people involved in putting the concerns in writing were putting their licenses in jeopardy because of the “confidential” nature of these math tests.

The “confidentiality” and/or secrecy of testing in this state borders on lunacy. Teachers and their students have no clue what was or is on these end-of-course exams. Who does that? I’ll tell you who does not do it: The AP, ACT, SAT, LSAT, GMAT and civil service exams. All of them release sample test questions and practice tests to help students prepare for their exams.

There are two testing consortiums created by the feds to create K-12 tests. One of them, PARCC, releases sample test questions and practice tests. Parents and the community only know that students are being tested. They have no idea what that means.

I’ll tell you, though: If a student computes 21 x 32 correctly and gets 672, if he or she doesn’t write the answer as 600 +70 + 2, then his or her answer on the test is wrong. Who marks a correct answer wrong? Well, Nevada does. Silly me. All this time, I thought that answers were only marked wrong when they were incorrect. (I’m not talking about common core, but as you probably realized, this testing I’m referring to works just like it.)

How is this fair for our students? How frustrating is that for our teachers and students? The current testing methods effectively falsify information to parents and the community, suggesting as they do that students can’t compute when they can.

My belief is simple. We should not play “gotcha” with our students. Students and their teachers should know what we expect them to know, recognize, understand, communicate and be able to do. And teachers should have an efficient and effective method to prepare for high-stakes exams that could determine if they are being promoted or eligible for graduation – not trying to guess what’s on the test or how it’s scored.

But back to the state. The superintendent and state board, apparently, still want students to take these SAME exams that have been deemed inappropriate and disallowed for graduation requirements by the Legislature and... use them to count for 20 percent of students’ grades.

What???

This common core nonsense, adopted and sanctioned by Nevada under a different name in order to fool the community, means students can actually be marked wrong for a correct answer because they didn’t do math “the new way.” And a test that works like that will affect 20 percent of their grade. How do you feel about that, parents?

The state needs to drop SBAC testing altogether because of the expense, secrecy, lack of reliability, lack of equal access for students to computers, reporting shortfalls — and failure to correctly know what constitutes a correct answer. The state also needs to drop these end-of-course exams until the public, including teachers and their students, have an opportunity to discuss them in the full light of day. If the tests are good, they should stand up to public scrutiny.

The Legislature needs to look into this and assure the public that testing transparency will occur so Nevada public education can begin to restore the credibility lost by so-called educational leaders who have no background in education.

Correction on 4/11/19 at 8:56 a.m.: This op-ed was updated to remove a phrase erroneously indicating that SBAC does not release practice materials.