When asked about the problems associated with standardized testing — cheating, overtesting, blunt measures of student achievement — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan often points to a duo of “next-generation assessments” funded by federal money, the Huffington Post reports. But a new survey, which consulting group Whiteboard Advisors plans to publish this week, suggests that “education insiders” aren’t so sure that the one of the new tests will resolve all of the issues with standardized testing. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed reported that they believe the Smarter, Balanced Assessment Coalition [1], one of the two state-based consortia developing the tests, is on the wrong track.
“Smarter Balanced seems to have started with a misdiagnosis of the testing program to begin with, and then gone from there,” one respondent wrote.
These new tests are funded by $330 million in stimulus money through the federal Race to the Top competition and are intended to measure critical thinking, particularly the critical skills emphasized by the Common Core State Standards, the set of educational standards most states have agreed to adopt…