When Gov. Rick Snyder signed Michigan's school aid budget last week, that act officially threw a big curve ball to teachers.
The budget included a provision ordering the Michigan Department of Education to produce and administer a MEAP test in the next school year, not the Smarter Balanced Assessment test they'd been planning to use –the test based on the Common Core standards that the state has been using.
If this all sounds confusing, try being a teacher in Michigan.
MLive’s Brian Smith has been talking with teachers about how they feel about the MEAP being back on.
“A lot of these teachers that I talked to are really just frustrated by the fact that now they just have a couple of months to prepare for a test they still haven’t seen,” Smith says.
He says the problem is that the MEAP hasn’t really been under active development, making sure the test is aligned with the state's content standards and the Common Core. So the test will have to be restructured.
Smith says in his report that all of the back-and-forth on the state's assessment test has left teachers feeling disrespected.
“They feel like their voices are not being heard in this conversation,” Smith says. “They’re not being included in the talk about how we are testing our kids and when we are testing our kids, and what that test is going to look like.”
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