By Jacqueline Rabe Thomas
UPDATE Gov. Dannel P. Malloy today dismissed calls from the state’s largest teachers union to stop testing students with the controversial Smarter Balanced Assessment and stood by use of the test results in evaluating teachers.
“We are not getting rid of the Smarter Balanced test,” the Democratic governor told reporters. The computer-based test is being used for the third year.
The Malloy administration did, however, agree to scale back for the second time in a year the number of Smarter Balanced exams public school students must take.
Last spring the state dropped the exam for high school juniors and replaced it with the SAT college-entrance exam. Today at Woodside Intermediate School in Cromwell, the governor announced that elementary and middle school students will no longer have to submit long-form essays – one of the two English assessments that students had to take last year. Students also will still have to take two assessments in math and one in science.
