This article on standardized testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to the Hechinger newsletter.
When schools in Columbus, Ohio, opened last fall for the state’s third-grade reading exam, just over a third of the students attended. The rest stayed at home, for reasons that district leaders can only imagine.
Some parents may be concerned that their children will contract the coronavirus, despite district security protocols. Others may not have the time or transportation to take their children to school. And some parents may have realized that the effort or risk was not worth it, as the state temporarily waived the requirement that students pass the test to advance to fourth grade, said Machelle Kline, district chief of responsibility.
The Columbus district experience offers a preview of the challenges ahead, as schools across the country prepare for a new round of standardized high-risk tests – mostly in person – that the federal government is demanding this spring after a one-year delay.
Some experts are concerned that many students will stay at home and miss tests, and that those who do will be the children with the greatest educational support at home, who are likely to perform well. If that happens, the test data will be distorted and could hinder states’ efforts to allocate funds where the Covid-19 crash was most pronounced.
“Bad data is worse than no data, because people will still make decisions based on bad data,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit.
Some state leaders have vague hope that President Joe Biden will suspend exams for the second year. Many others are seeking state and federal permission to change the way this year’s scores are used for accountability, arguing that it would be unfair to punish schools, teachers or students for falling scores due to the pandemic.
“We would like to have data, but not have consequences linked to it,” said Chris Woolard, senior executive director of performance and impact for the Ohio Department of Education.
Leaving aside concerns about data reliability, opponents argue that standardized testing during a pandemic will increase the stress that students and teachers are suffering and will reduce this year’s already restricted instruction time. They say that schools already have a lot of evidence that students have suffered the most from distance learning: low-income students and black students.
Do schools need data or ‘grace’?
Under the Primary and Secondary Education Act, states are required to test all students from third to eighth grade annually, as well as once in high school, and separate scores by race, income, English language proficiency and status. special education. States use the results to identify schools that need improvement and investment.
When the pandemic closed schools last March, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos granted states exemptions from annual testing of the law and accountability requirements.
Several states, including Georgia, Michigan, New York and South Carolina, have requested the agency’s permission to skip standardized tests again this year.
“It’s a lot of anxiety and stress in a year that has experienced unprecedented amount of stress,” said Ryan Brown, director of communications for the South Carolina Department of Education, who wants to replace a series of minor interim assessments with a major end of year.
But DeVos made it clear in a September letter to state school principals that they should not expect another general layoff this year. Instead, she offered guidance on how they can change their liability plans to account for coronavirus-related outages and missing data.
Now that Miguel Cardona is likely to take over the federal Department of Education, many state leaders expect the department to waive the requirement that states use test results to evaluate schools and districts, or even cancel tests altogether – although most agree that this is unlikely.
This is partly because prominent civil rights groups and Democrats in Congress have asked the department not to abandon standardized testing this year.
“If we don’t measure the opportunity gaps that are being exacerbated during Covid-19, we risk losing a generation of young people,” warned a dozen advocates for education, civil rights and disability in a letter sent in November to the department.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in early February, Cardona told lawmakers that states should have a say in whether assessments are linked to accountability measures.
Several states have said that they will not include test scores in teacher assessment systems or require students to pass a test to advance or graduate. Some, like Mississippi, eliminated the AF card grades for schools this year.
“I just feel this must be a free year for districts, teachers and students,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi superintendent of education.
What to do with remote students
With almost 40% of students still attending school virtually, the biggest challenge that states face as they move into the standardized testing season will be figuring out whether – and how – to test remote students.
Some manufacturers of standardized tests claim that their exams can be taken remotely, as long as students have approved devices and Internet access.
But almost a year after districts and nonprofits started distributing laptops and access points, student access remains uneven. In a recent Education Week survey, more than a fifth of families said they still did not have reliable access to a computer or other digital device, and almost a quarter said they did not have a reliable Internet.
There is also the problem of test security. Although manufacturers of standardized tests say teachers and staff can supervise tests remotely, many schools are not prepared to do so.
And, based on last fall’s results, when students took minor standardized tests at home, remote monitoring may not work.
Two of the leading test makers, NWEA and Renaissance, found that some younger students performed significantly better when they took the test at home – a finding that suggests parental help. In Columbus, school leaders gave a talk to parents about the purposes of the diagnostic test – to provide a snapshot of a student’s independent skills so that teachers can give them the appropriate job – after a few students in the kindergarten. childhood who could barely choose the words tested in a third party. or fourth grade level, said Kline.
Faced with these challenges, few states are planning to test students remotely, according to Scott Norton, deputy executive director for programs at the State Board of School Directors.
The neediest students cannot take the tests
There are worrying signs that many students are not doing the provisional assessments that districts use to identify students with difficulties, and state leaders fear that the same is true for standardized high-stakes tests this spring. Nationally, 1 in 4 students attending schools that administered the NWEA MAP growth assessment in autumn 2019 and fall 2020 did not take the test in 2020, an analysis by the test manufacturer found.
The analysis found higher attrition rates among black and Hispanic students, students with lower academic performance and students from schools with higher concentrations of low-income students.
Failing to take into account these participation gaps can lead districts to “underestimate the magnitude of the decline in achievement”, potentially resulting in “underprovision of support and services for the most needy students”, warn the authors.
Other studies suggest that absent students are more likely to attend school online. In December, nearly three-quarters of urban school districts – which disproportionately enroll low-income, black students – were still completely remote, compared with just a third of suburban districts, according to the Center for Reinventing Public Education.
At the very least, state leaders expect the Biden government to offer a pause in the requirement that 95% of their students be tested.
“I don’t think there is a state in the country that can have a 95% participation rate this year,” said Wright, Mississippi superintendent.