It turns out that one of Amazon’s considerations in deciding where to build it’s second headquarters—or HQ2— is the average SAT (or ACT) score of students in the cities on their list of potential options. Not only does it figure into their calculation of what the local talent pool will look like in the coming… Continue reading Hey Alexa, Do Test Scores Matter? Duh, Of Course They Do
[<a href=”//storify.com/esanzi/policy-and-a-personal-story-about-why-act-sat-shou” target=”_blank”>View the story “Policy and a Personal Story About Why ACT/SAT Should Be Free and Taken During School Hours” on Storify</a>]
PARCC data is in and while the overall news isn’t good, there are some bright spots for sure including huge gains at some schools and far more students taking the SAT now that it’s free. Big shout out to all the schools that posted significant gains and/or are members of the elite club that Dan… Continue reading 2017 PARCC Results in RI: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Rhode Island is making a big change in how it assesses students that will bring us in line with Massachusetts in grades 3-8 and reduce testing time by 50 percent at the high school level. PARCC will no longer be the test we administer in Rhode Island so while the teaching standards will remain the… Continue reading Rhode Island is Getting Smarter (and More Like Mass)
Rhode Island 10th and 11th graders took the PSAT and SATs for free for the first time this year. The PSAT was administered in the fall and just last week, during the school day, high school juniors took the SAT. They are the first cohort of students to benefit from Governor Raimondo’s free SAT/PSAT plan… Continue reading Removing Barriers: Step 1, Free Access to the SAT
When ESSA, The Every Student Succeeds Act, passed and the president signed it, we knew it would happen: States would take the flexibility now afforded to them under federal statute to backslide on accountability. But—maybe naively—I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly, before the rule-making around ESSA’s accountability provisions have even been finalized. We’re… Continue reading Little Rhody Runs From the Truth and Eliminates Annual Testing after Grade 9
