State quells fears of new standards

WASILLA — As the state mulls over changes to how it tests students, the House Standing Education Committee met Monday to hear from a critic of the new tests.

“Smarter Balanced (Assessment Consortium) has also said in its agreement with the federal government that it will also test students for what it calls ‘self-management skills,’” said Joy Pullman, a research fellow at the conservative think-tank Heartland Institute.

“The federal government will have access to all data that Smarter Balance gets from the state,” she said.

She also said that the state will end up with standards set on a federal level and that information could be shared without parental consent.

“What I wanted to do was have someone from out of state who is very familiar with what’s happening in the Lower 48 show (where) our differences are and (where they’re) potentially the same,” Rep. Lynn Gattis, R-Wasilla, said of why she invited Pullman to speak.

But state education officials say no one will be changing Alaska’s educational standards but Alaskans. Department of Education and Early Development Commissioner Mike Hanley said there is no authority to make Alaska comply with some outside set of standards and Alaska wouldn’t be interested in such standards.

“We aren’t interested in the rules, but we are interested in making sure our kids are competitive,” Hanley said.

He said that where federal standards make students in Alaska competitive with students across the country and across the globe, the state sees benefit in implementing those.

“We’ve never hidden the fact from our superintendents that these standards are rigorous, they’re going to raise the bar for our kids and they’re very similar to what’s going on around the country,” he said.

Those new standards, he said, are different enough from the old benchmarks that the state needs new ways to assess whether children are learning, he said. The state believes the Smarter Balanced tests offer the best model for testing students.

“Our standards are separate. We’re looking for a tool to measure our kids on our standards,” he said.

The tests will measure what the state wants measured and will be graded by some firm other than Smarter Balanced, Hanley said. He added that standards also don’t tell a teacher or a school district how to teach. If a district thinks that it’s best to teach math in the context of having children build boats, so be it.

He brought along to the meeting Susan McCauley, formerly principal of Birchtree Charter School on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway and currently director of EED’s Division of Teaching and Learning Support.

McCauley said that when she was principal of Birchtree, students there learned some of their math through knitting.

“The way we went about teaching those standards looked very, very different than any other school in the district,” she said.

But, Hanley said, as long as it’s clear the students are learning what the state expect them to learn, the state is fine with that.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.