By David Spring.

The corporate press likes to say that Common Core and the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test were adopted in Washington state in 2010 or 2011. This might cause one to believe that Common Core and SBAC were adopted a long time ago. In fact, the Common Core was adopted by the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Randy Dorn, in 2010 who signed some kind of informal agreement in the summer of 2010. However, Superintendent Dorn does not have the authority to change Washington state laws. So the actual bill to adopt Common Core and SBAC was not voted on by the legislature until the last week of June 2013. The bill that actually changed Washington state law to adopt Common Core and the SBAC test in Washington state was House Bill 1450 which passed during the last week of June, 2013. Here is a link to the bill.

The 2013 House bill 1450 formally authorized both CCSS and SBAC. I used HB 1450 to write 2015 Senate bill 6030 to repeal CCSS and SBAC. (See the description of SB 6030 here).

If you look at 2015 SB 6030 and compare it to 2013 HB 1450, you will see that every place HB 1450 added new language (to more than one dozen laws), I deleted the new language and returned it to the old language. In other words, 2015 SB 6030 would repeal 2013 HB 1450. HB 1450 was written by Randy Dorn and he requested that the legislature pass HB 1450 in January, 2013.

To understand how this really happened, I interviewed several Washington state Senators and Representatives about HB 1450 and the vote to pass it. The bill was passed with little objection from either political party. No one knew what was in the bill because it was a “striker amendment” meaning the entire 20 page bill was replaced at the last minute and no one even had time to read it. The vote was done as a last minute “midnight” bill which was part of a package of bills to pass the budget (which was more than two months late that year). Without this passage, the State of Washington was facing a government shutdown on July 1, 2013.

At the original public hearing for HB 1450, in February 2013, the bill was sold by the superintendent’s staff as simply “stream lining” the assessment process by eliminating the algebra and geometry end of course assessments and the MSP math test – replacing all three of them with the SBAC test. Also the MSP Reading and Writing tests were combined into a single SBAC English test. So five tests would be replaced with two tests. This selling pitch was echoed in the House Bill Report from February 2013 which stated “The purpose of the bill is to reduce the number and reduce testing time.” Who could be against that?

See the original House Bill Analysis at this link.

The February 2013 version of House Bill 1450 bill was supported by Randy Dorn but opposed by Wendy Rader Konofalski and Katie Carper of the Washington Education Association and Marie Sullivan, of the Washington State School Directors’ Association. These three wise opponents of the bill noted that the bill might reduce some testing but would increase other tests. They urged moving away from high stakes testing to the greatest extent possible. These were the only three people to speak in opposition to this “test consolidation” bill. Here is a link to this report for the original HB 1450:

Also see the handout that was created by superintendent’s staff for the public hearing on February 8 2013 which specifically stated that the CCR test (which would later be called SBAC) would not be a graduation requirement. Here is the link to this handout.

Here is an image of this handout showing the consolidation of tests. I have placed a red box around the sentence confirming that CCR would NOT be a graduation requirement:

In February, 2013, Representative McCoy successfully added an “appeal process” allowing parents and students to claim that the new test was culturally biased. This amendment was later removed from the final “striker version” of the bill.

After this, despite the fact that the bill was requested by Randy Dorn, there never was a vote in the House Education committee in 2013. Instead, the bill seemed to die after the public hearing on February 8 2013. On May 13, like all other dead bills, it was “reintroduced and retained in its present state.” But then on June 21, 2013, suddenly this zombie bill came roaring back to life. The Education Committee was “relieved of further consideration.” (I did not know this was even possible).

A week later, on June 27, 2013, the House “rules were suspended” and the last minute striker amendment turned HB 1450 into a SBAC test monster. Suddenly, the SBAC test would be a graduation requirement and a mandatory test which all students were required to take at least once. A vote was taken on the 20 page striker bill which passed 81 to 8. The only No votes in the House were Appleton, Bergquist, Buys, Harris, Overstreet, Scott, Shea, and Taylor. There was only slightly more resistance to the bill in the Senate with the following 12 Senators voting NO: Senator Baumgartner, Benton, Brown, Ericksen, Hasegawa, Hewitt, Holmquist Newbry, Honeyford, Padden, Roach, Sheldon, and Smith. Congratulations to these 20 legislators for realizing their was something fishy about a test “streamlining bill that cost an additional $200 million dollars!

There was a fiscal note for HB 1450 from OSPI indicating that the cost would be more than $200 million to the General Fund State budget (this did not include cost to local school districts that I estimate to be more than one billion dollars). The $200 million was nearly all to pay for a “contract” to some un-named group to do the SBAC test. Here is the link to the HB 1450 fiscal note.

This extra $200 million in Washington state funds is despite the fact that about $200 million in federal Race to the Top funds were used to create the SBAC test. So SBAC was and continues to be a major financial boondoogle. SBAC is not only the worst most unfair test ever created, it is also the most expensive test ever created!

Despite this strange legislative history, Governor Inslee signed the bill into law on July 3, 2013 and it went into effect on September 28 2013. In fact, it did not really go into effect until the following school year in the fall of 2014 with the implementation of CCSS curriculum. It was not until the fall of 2014 that SBAC announced that the test would fail two out of every three students who took the test. Beginning in March 2015, the SBAC test will be administered to all 3^rd grade, 4^th grade, 5^th grade, 6^th grade, 7^th grade, 8^th grade and 11^th grade students in Washington state for the first time ever.

In response, in May 2014, the Washington state Republican party voted unanimously to oppose Common Core and the SBAC test. In January 2015, the Washington State Democratic Party voted by overwhelmingly to oppose Common Core and the SBAC test. In February, 2015, bills were introduced to repeal Common Core and SBAC in the Washington State Senate and the Washington State House. Many parents and teachers are starting Opt Out groups all over Washington state. Some schools are also beginning to resist this insane test. On February 24, 2014, the Nathan Hale High School leadership committee voted overwhelmingly to not give the SBAC test to 11^th grade students. There are several other schools also looking to opt out of the SBAC test. So far from being old history, the real history of the SBAC test monster is just getting started.

Regards,

David Spring M. Ed.

Opt Out Washington (dot) org

February 25 2015

springforschools@aol.com