Meadowdale students join in protest against standardized test

EDMONDS — Twenty Meadowdale High School juniors showed up early at school Thursday to protest having to take yet another standardized test.

This time it was the Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is mandatory but not required for graduation.

High school students already have to take four tests that are required for graduation, as well as myriad others, including college-entry exams and Advanced Placement tests, said Cindy Nguyen, the Meadowdale junior who organized the demonstration.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment simply “creates unnecessary anxiety” and takes away classroom time from more meaningful instruction, she said.

Only 18 percent of juniors at Meadowdale High School took the test on Thursday. Across the Edmonds School District, which includes Meadowdale, 1,231 juniors — or 81 percent of the class — did not take the test this year.

Thousands of high school juniors across Snohomish County have refused to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment test, but the proportions doing so vary by school district. In the Northshore School District, which includes areas of Snohomish and King counties, 641 juniors, or 41 percent of that class, refused to take the test. Parents must sign off if a student refuses to take the test.

“Many of those students had already completed the required state assessments and didn’t want to take another test,” said Leanne Albrecht, the Northshore district’s communications director.

In the Snohomish School District, 63 percent of juniors didn’t take the test, while only 6.5 percent in Marysville refused.

Other districts in metro Puget Sound have seen refusals, too. Students in several Seattle high schools organized boycotts against the test. Across the country, tens of thousands of students have reportedly opted out of required assessments.

Nguyen said she organized Thursday’s demonstration to protest the proliferation of standardized testing in public education. While the Smarter Balanced Assessment for juniors is not required for graduation now, it will replace currently required reading and writing tests starting with the class of 2017.

For now, the new test is used primarily to measure a school’s performance, Nguyen said. “My learning is a second priority to that.”

She said some of her teachers have taken time to address the format of the Smarter Balanced Assessment. “There is always that air: ‘You need to understand how to answer this question or that question.’”

She and fellow students have had to take time away from classroom instruction to go to Meadowdale’s computer lab to learn how to take the new test, part of which is administered on computers, she said.

The Everett School District spent $1.7 million to ensure it had enough laptops to accommodate the new test.

The test’s creator, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, on its website says it is “valid, reliable and fair.” However, legislators in Maine are considering a bill to do away with the test.

While Nguyen is concerned about how the test affects her education, school administrators are worried about how refusing to take it affects a district’s compliance with No Child Left Behind requirements. The 2002 federal law requires U.S. public schools to administer standardized tests.

A student refusing to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment counts as a zero in the scoring used to determine compliance, Marysville Superintendent Becky Berg said.

Not having perfect scores this year led to most schools in the state being labeled “schools of improvement” under the federal law. They are more commonly referred to as “failing schools.”

Washington applied to the federal Department of Education for a waiver from No Child Left Behind requirements, but a waiver was denied.

The state’s top educator, Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, defended the Smarter Balanced Assessment in a public statement last month. If more than 5 percent of students don’t take federally required tests, the U.S. Department of Education could withhold money from public schools.

“The decision to refuse testing doesn’t just affect the individual student,” he said in the statement. “It affects students across the state. If you don’t like the federal law, don’t refuse to have your child take the tests; call your U.S. representative and senators and tell them to change the law.”

Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.

Juniors refusing to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment

School districtRefusals (% of junior class)

Arlington:65 (15.7)

Edmonds:1,281 (81.0)

Everett:572 (43.4)

Lake Stevens:124 (21.4)

Marysville:65 (6.5)

Monroe:N/A

Snohomish:510 (63.5)

Stanwood-Camano:241 (81.0)

Sources: School districts