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Benchmark testing for students1/17/2024 And a key tenet of the theory of teaching reading that underpins part of the test had been undermined by scientific evidence decades earlier. Superintendent Matt Wayne said he’s looking for a replacement - one that “ensures that children are literate.”īut the studies showing the problems with the BAS had been available for the better part of a decade. It’s joining other schools around the country, including Fort Worth (Texas), Baltimore County (Maryland) and Nashua (New Hampshire) in dropping the BAS as their district-wide assessment.Īt a March school board meeting, San Francisco’s top administrators presented internal data showing the test did a poor job predicting how kindergarteners and first graders eventually scored on the state’s standardized test. This spring, after years of defending the BAS, San Francisco Unified finally conceded the test is too frequently inaccurate. And she has tried to convince the district to drop the test that missed his reading difficulties. (Kelley requested that her son not be identified so she could candidly discuss his academic performance and medical history while maintaining his privacy.)įor six years, Kelley has been fighting to get her son, now 13, a proper education in how to read. “The more research I do, the more I realize it’s problematic,” Kelley said. That means struggling readers might be less likely to get the help they need before they fall even further behind their classmates. One professor who analyzed the BAS said it was worse at identifying struggling readers than any assessment he had ever seen. It is also more expensive for the schools and more time-consuming for the teachers to administer, according to an analysis comparing it to other tests. But researchers who’ve studied it say the BAS is wrong far too often to be useful. Teachers are supposed to use it as a checkup to see how students are progressing throughout the year. The Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) is one of the most popular measures of early reading ability in American elementary schools. The Benchmark Assessment System had been - and would continue to be - wrong about how well he could read. The results showed her son was so far behind his peers in reading and writing that he fit the profile for dyslexia. Near the end of first grade, the school finally agreed to do a more comprehensive evaluation. She said they gave her the runaround their reading test, after all, showed her son was doing fine. That year, in 2017, she asked the school to test her son for a learning disability. Kelley, a single parent living in Bayview, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, knew something wasn’t right. The teacher said he probably just needed time to catch on. His reading level on the test had landed within the appropriate range for his age. She said she’d given the boy San Francisco Unified School District’s go-to reading test: the Benchmark Assessment System. Halfway through his kindergarten year, his teacher said he still couldn’t recognize some letters on sight.īut that teacher told Kelley not to fret. He reversed them or scrawled incoherent shapes. But Kelley’s son couldn’t write most of them on his own. The San Francisco mom reviewed letters with him for hours at a time, reciting their names and tracing their shapes. The first thing Havah Kelley noticed was her son’s trouble with the alphabet.
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