Wasted Effort

I spent about a day and a half earlier this month working through the new writing assessment with my kids. It was a pain in the ass that ate up an awful lot of instructional time. Looks like it was also wasted effort:

Dear District Assessment Coordinators and Principals:
This fall, grade 5 teachers in your district volunteered to administer the writing pilot for the Measurements of Student Progress (MSP). Stand-alone pilot research programs such as this are one of the best ways to obtain data necessary for the development of new MSP writing prompts. We very much appreciate the additional time spent by you, as well as your district and school staff and students.

About two weeks ago, Governor Chris Gregoire announced to OSPI that across the board budget cuts would need to be made by October 15. Since that announcement the Assessment and Student Information Division has had to make some very difficult decisions in order to meet this latest budget challenge. Many activities were identified that would either be postponed or cut. Among the list of activities was the grade 5 writing pilot.

At this time we are holding all writing pilot booklets in our processing center in Minnesota. All subsequent activities, including scoring and training workshops, also have been put on hold. It is our hope that at some point in the near future we will be able to resume processing, scoring, and convening a teacher training workshop.

Please share this news with the fall writing pilot participating teachers.
If you have any questions, contact us at (360) 725-6348 or at Assessment@k12.wa.us.

Regards,
Assessment Operations