The district appreciates the continued patience of families as it adapts to accommodate the many challenges presented by the pandemic. The California Department of Education recently received approval for a federal waiver that allows districts flexibility in administering end-of-the-year English language arts and mathematics assessments. The Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment (SBAC) exams were waived last spring due to COVID-19 closures and Fresno Unified used Curriculum Associate’s i-Ready tool as a measure of student learning during the pandemic. Using this tool allowed the district to collect baseline and national comparison data for use throughout the pandemic.
The i-Ready tool is already planned for administration for students in kindergarten through 10th grade beginning in May. Fresno Unified will use the flexibility to administer only i-Ready as opposed to giving both SBAC and i-Ready in the last two months of school. i-Ready meets the California State Board of Education’s criteria and will continue to enable the district to identify student strengths and areas for growth.
Students in 11th grade will still take the SBAC as they are not scheduled to take i-Ready, and SBAC for 11th grade provides the Early Assessment Program scores for participating community colleges and California State Universities. The SBAC has been modified and shortened this year. Both assessments can be administered in person, remotely, or a combination of both.
Using the i-Ready is beneficial for Fresno Unified in several ways: All teachers are trained in administering i-Ready, have administered the assessment twice in the 2020-21 and are preparing to give i-Ready in the last quarter; parents and families are familiar with the i-Ready data; comparison data are already available from a fall and winter administrations while the most recent SBAC was administered at the end of the 2018-19 school year; summer extended learning opportunities are designed to use i-Ready data to guide the focus of the summer programs; and i-Ready data is available for local, state, and national comparisons to better understand the impacts COVID closures have had on all students.
With the transition back to in-person learning and teachers’ continued adjustments to meet the needs of all students — both in person and remotely — reducing the time spent on testing and utilizing i-Ready tools to measure student learning will be advantageous for students.