National Benchmarks for State Achievement Standards
From the executive summary: “This report uses national benchmarking as a common metric to examine state achievement standards and compare how high these standards are compared to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement levels. It also compares how much students are expected to learn in some states with how much they are expected to learn in other states. The study uses NAEP grades 4 and 8 reading and mathematics as benchmarks for individual state achievement standards. The study also benchmarks the achievement standards of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (referred to in this study as Smarter Balanced), Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and ACT Aspire. Benchmarking Smarter Balanced, PARCC, and ACT Aspire provides a common metric (i.e., the NAEP scale) that can be used to compare the stringency of their achievement standards. The most important findings in the study relate to achievement standards that represent college readiness. Each of these consortium tests in grades 4 and 8 has achievement standards that indicate the student is on track to be college ready.”
This resource is of high-quality in that it clearly explains where various current end-of-year assessments fall in relation to the standards set by NAEP in order to raise all students’ achievement. It communicates clearly using tables to illustrate similarities and differences between assessments (both consortium and state-created). This resource can be highly useful for state-level educators and assessment developers as they work to align standards and assessments with college and career ready expectations for students. It has the potential to have a substantial impact on students from different states as it provides useful information to help create common high expectations across end-of-year assessments.