Missouri is one of the first states to release results from last spring's testing based, for the first time, on the controversial Common Core standards.
The national standards were the brainchild of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, and originally were an attempt to create a way states could compare their education efforts with each other and with other countries.
Many of those states, including Missouri, joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, cooperating on developing tests based on the Common Core standards.
However, the federal Education Department made adopting the Common Core standards a criteria for states to qualify for the federal "Race to the Top" funding, and a number of states' leaders or legislators forced their states to back away from the standards.
Former Missouri lawmaker Charlie Shields now is president of the state Board of Education.
"We'll know this fall how our scores compared to the other Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium states," he noted during Tuesday's board meeting.
However, next year, he was reminded, Missouri lawmakers have told the state to develop its own education standards.
"We are not able to use any linking items from the Smarter Balanced Consortium," DESE curriculum assessment coordinator Michael Muenks told Shields. "So our ties, our comparability to Smarter Balanced ends."
Comparisons with other states can still be accomplished through ACT test scores and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has goals of comparing student achievement in states and other jurisdictions, and to track changes in achievement of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders in mathematics, reading, writing, science and other subjects.
"So, you're limited in your ability to determine your success, because you move off a national benchmark to a state benchmark?" Shields asked.
Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven answered people want some comparability among the states.
Under the more rigorous standards developed around the Common Core, "people have continued to tell me they have seen students do things they never thought they could do," DESE assistant commissioner Sharon Helwig said. "These standards raised complexity for students (and) kiddos are stepping up."
Shields told the News Tribune the state board didn't make a mistake when it joined the Common Core effort in 2010.
"It was probably the right thing to do back then," he said. "But when you have a state where there's clearly, in the general public, a lot of lost confidence in the Common Core standards, I think that's why the process we're going through right now is really appropriate."
Former state board president Peter Herschend voted for the Common Core standards in 2010.
"The goal was to prepare the students in this nation to be able to be competitive in a world economy, where we live today," Herschend said. "That became fraught with political overtones that had very, very little to do with education."
So the national standards idea "didn't work," he added. "It is not going to be accepted by a significant voice in the body-politic in this nation - in the near term.
"In the longer term, I think there will have to come a time when that (national standards) will happen."
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