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The Smarter Balanced Practice Test is available to schools and districts for practice and training purposes, professional development activities, and for discussions with parents, policymakers, and other interested stakeholders. Calculators are available for students to preview and practice with outside of the testing

Student Interface Practice Test

We’re now in the most literate age in history.

Clare Wood, development psychologist at Coventry University

Her own study of primary schoolchildren suggested that texting improved their reading ability.

Texters, after all, are constantly practising reading and spelling. Sure, children tend not to punctuate text messages. But most of them grasp that this genre has different rules from, say, school exams.

George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written English, and much livelier speech. “Spoken English is full of slang,” he wrote, “it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way.” His ideal was writing that sounded like speech. We’re getting there at last.

we have ignored the strongest evidence emerging from the international tests: the adverse effects of poverty and concentrations of poverty in schools on student performance in all countries.

Although countries can exacerbate or mitigate the impact of poverty through their social, fiscal, and education policies, and although some students do overcome the odds, the fact is the gap between high-poverty and more-affluent students remains a fundamental problem in virtually every country.

our rhetoric has assumed that test-score rankings are linked to a country’s economic competitiveness, yet the data for industrialized countries consistently show this assumption to be unwarranted. For example, the World Economic Forum’s 2010-2011 global-competitiveness report ranks the United States fourth, exceeded only by Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore. Many of the countries that ranked high on test scores rank lower than the United States on competitiveness—for example, South Korea, No. 22, and Finland, No. 7.

Poverty, not international test-score comparisons, is the most critical problem to be addressed by our public policies. Unfortunately, our recent political polarization over budgetary priorities does not leave much room for optimism.