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New Canaan High School Juniors’ Anxiety a Concern with Common Core ‘SBAC’ Testing
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Faced with new standardized testing that they say is burdensome, in many cases inconsequential and raises concerns about privacy and data-tracking, some New Canaan parents have said they’ll pull their kids out of school to avoid it—a move whose consequences remain unclear, a local expert says. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium field test is being administered now in waves, in grades three through eight and also grade 11 (the “SBAC,” as it’s called, also is designed to check for college and career readiness). The state has said districts must get 95 percent student participation, and local school officials are pushing that information down to parents, though neither has said what the repercussions will be if all of those kids do not show up, according to Kate Guthrie, director of academic services with the New Canaan office of Greenwich Education Group. The company’s services include tutoring, standardized test prep, day and boarding school advice and college counseling. “Grade 11 is currently the most contentious piece of this, because there are also the SATs and the ACTs and a number of other standardized tests to contend with,” Guthrie said.