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Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The Hechinger Report
To test or not to test? Educators weigh the value of standardized testing during a pandemic
By Kelly Field
February 12, 2021
When schools in Columbus, Ohio, opened up classrooms this fall for the
state’s third grade reading exam, just over a third of students showed
up. The rest stayed home, for reasons district leaders can only guess
at.
Some parents may have worried their child would contract the
coronavirus, despite the district’s strict safety protocols. Others
might have lacked the time or transportation to get their child to
school. And some parents may have figured it wasn’t worth the effort or
risk, since the state has temporarily waived a requirement that
students pass the test to advance a grade, said Machelle Kline, the
district’s chief accountability officer.
Kline said she’s confident more students will take the end-of-year
tests in March and April, when the city’s elementary schools are
scheduled to be open to all students. In the meantime, teachers are
using other tools to identify the struggling readers the state test
missed, including the use of assessments that can be taken at home.
But research by one of the nation’s major test-makers, NWEA, suggests
that some of the most vulnerable remote learners are also skipping the
interim tests meant to measure academic growth. That leaves districts
like Columbus, where students in grades 6-12 are still studying online,
with an incomplete picture of the pandemic’s impact on student learning.
The Columbus district’s experience with its third grade reading exam
offers a preview of the challenges ahead, as schools nationwide prepare
to resume standardized testing following a one-year federal reprieve.
Though some state leaders are holding on to faint hope that President
Joe Biden will suspend the exams for a second year, most are crafting
plans to test students this spring, largely in person.
At the same time, many states are seeking state and federal permission
to change how this year’s scores are used for accountability purposes,
arguing that it would be unfair to punish schools, teachers or students
for drops due to the pandemic.
“We’d like to have data, but not have consequences tied to the data,”
said Chris Woolard, senior executive director for performance and
impact for the Ohio Department of Education.
Those who favor a return to standardized testing say policymakers need
comparable, state-level data to focus their spending on districts where
the “Covid-slide” has been the steepest.
“We know the impact of Covid has not been distributed equally across
communities, so it’s not going to make sense to spread our resources
broadly, like peanut butter,” said Jennifer O’Neal Schiess, a partner
at Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit focused on the
needs of underserved children. “We need to be strategic.”
Opponents counter that testing during a pandemic will add to the stress
students and teachers are under and cut into this year’s already
constrained instructional time. They say schools already have plenty of
evidence on which students have suffered the most under remote
learning: low-income students and students of color.
“It’s only going to tell us what we already know,” said Joshua Starr,
chief executive officer of PDK International, a professional
organization for educators.
Some testing experts say that gaps in the data will render it useless
for comparison purposes and could even lead to the misallocation of
resources.
“Bad data is worse than no data, because people will still make
decisions based on bad data,” said Scott Marion, executive director of
the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational
Assessment.
Both sides agree on one thing, though: The pandemic could be an
inflection point in the long-running fight over standardized testing in
the United States, a chance to reassess the role assessments play in
state accountability systems, or at least to reduce their burden on
schools.
“This is a great opportunity to think about how to do assessments
better,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public
Education, a nonpartisan research center focused on inequities in
education.
Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESSA, states are
required to test every student in seven grades annually, and to
separate scores by race, income, English language proficiency and
special education status. The end-of-year state standardized tests
start in third grade. The results factor into state-specific
accountability systems, which are used to identify schools in need of
improvement and investment.
When the pandemic shut down schools last March, Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos gave states waivers from the law’s annual testing and
accountability requirements.
A few states, including Georgia, Michigan, New York and South Carolina,
have requested the agency’s permission to skip standardized testing
again this year.
“It’s a lot of anxiety and stress in a year that has already had an
unprecedented amount of stress,” said Ryan Brown, chief communications
officer for the South Carolina Department of Education, which wants to
substitute a series of interim assessments for a big end-of-year one.
Educators are split on whether it’s worth administering standardized
tests this spring. Federal requirements may leave them with no choice
but to try.
But the former education secretary made clear in a September letter to
state school chiefs that they shouldn’t expect another blanket waiver
this year. Instead, she offered them guidance on how they might amend
their accountability plans to account for Covid-era disruptions and
missing data from last year, and gave them a February 1 deadline to
submit their more limited waiver requests.
The guidance doesn’t relieve states of their responsibility to
differentiate among schools, but it might permit them to change how
they judge them. A state could seek to swap one metric for another, for
example, or reduce the weight test scores carry in their ratings, said
Scott Norton, deputy executive director of programs for the Council of
Chief State School Officers.
The guidance could also allow states to wait another year to identify
new schools in need of support and improvement — an option several
states plan to take advantage of, assuming it is retained by the Biden
administration.
In late January, after Biden took office, the Education Department
extended its deadline for requesting amendments to state accountability
plans indefinitely. Many state leaders hope the new administration will
go further, waiving the requirement that states use test scores to rate
schools and districts, or even canceling the tests altogether — though
most concede that’s unlikely.
Although Biden has expressed past support for ending the use of
high-stake tests, some prominent civil rights groups and congressional
Democrats have urged him not to abandon them this year.
“If we do not measure the opportunity gaps being exacerbated
during Covid-19, we risk losing a generation of young people,” a
coalition of a dozen education, civil rights and disability advocates
warned in a November letter to the department.
That’s a concern that Biden’s pick for Education Secretary, Connecticut
education commissioner Miguel Cardona, seems to share. In October, his
department issued a memo that called Connecticut’s state assessments
“important guideposts to our promise of equity.”
But the memo also said that Connecticut would seek a federal pass on
“big ‘A’ accountability” this year. And in his Senate confirmation
hearing in early February, Cardona told lawmakers that states should
have a say over whether those assessments should be tied to
accountability measures.
State policymakers aren’t waiting for Washington to act, and are making
changes in how they use data from the mandated tests. Already, several
states have said they won’t include test scores in teacher evaluation
systems or won’t require students to pass a test to advance a grade or
graduate high school. Some, like Mississippi, have done away with A-F
letter grades for schools.
“I just feel this needs to be a year of grace for districts and
teachers and students,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s superintendent
of education.
Yet Wright and some other state leaders say they’re planning to proceed
with standardized testing, even if the new president grants another
reprieve. In Oklahoma, Superintendent Joy Hofmeister said the tests
will help the state allocate $665 million it received in the second
round of federal stimulus money to schools with the greatest need.
“We can’t make those important investments without the most comparable data,” she said.
With close to 40 percent of students still attending “virtual-only”
schools, the biggest challenge confronting states as they head into
standardized test season will be figuring out whether — and how — to
test remote learners.
Some standardized test makers claim their exams can be taken remotely,
provided that students have approved devices and access to the internet.
“This is a great opportunity to think about how to do assessments better”
Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education
But nearly a year after districts and nonprofits began distributing
thousands of laptops and hotspots to students stuck studying at home,
access to those technologies remains uneven. In a recent survey by
Education Week, more than a fifth of households said they still lack
reliable access to a computer or other digital device and nearly a
quarter said they don’t have dependable internet.
There is also the problem of test security. Though the standardized
test makers say teachers and staff can proctor their end-of-year tests
remotely, many schools aren’t set up to do so.
And based on results from earlier in the year, when students took
lower-stakes standardized tests at home, remote proctoring might not
work that well. When two of the top test makers, NWEA and Renaissance,
compared results from interim exams administered before the pandemic
and after, they discovered that some of the younger learners performed
significantly better when they took the test at home — a finding that
hints at parental “help.” In Columbus, school leaders held a talk for
parents about the purposes of diagnostic testing — to provide a
snapshot of a student’s independent skills so that teachers can give
them appropriate work — after a few kindergarteners who could barely
pick out words tested at a third- or fourth- grade level, Kline said.
“As parents, we don’t want to see our children struggling,” Ronda
Welch, the district’s director of testing, said she told them. “But if
they score too high, that will make things more challenging for them.”
Even if states could overcome these logistical challenges, it would be
difficult for them to compare or combine results from remote and
in-person exams, testing experts say. After all, a student sitting at
the kitchen table surrounded by siblings faces far more distractions
than a student sitting in a quiet classroom, separated six feet from
other students.
“Even minor differences in administrative conditions can have major
impacts on test scores,” said Daniel Koretz, a research professor at
Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Given these challenges, few states are planning to test students remotely, Norton said.
Some states, including Texas, will require remote learners to test in
person, either at school, or at an alternative site set up by the
district, such as a performing arts center, recreational center, or
hotel. Others, like Ohio, will offer in-school testing to remote
learners, but allow families to opt out.
Woolard, who oversees testing for the state, said administrators there
are still calculating participation rates for the fall’s reading test,
but believe the vast majority of third graders took the exam. The
drop-off, it appears, was largely confined to the large urban
districts, like Columbus and Cleveland, which were operating
online-only, he said.
Since those cities serve some of the state’s most vulnerable students,
districts will need to look to other measures to “fill in the gaps” on
learning loss, he said.
Nearly three quarters of urban school districts were still operating in
fully remote mode in December, compared to only a third of suburban
districts
But there are troubling signs that many students aren’t taking the
interim assessments districts use to identify struggling learners,
either. Nationally, one in every four students attending schools that
administered the NWEA MAP Growth assessment in both the fall of 2019
and 2020 did not take the test in 2020, an analysis by the test-maker
found.
The analysis didn’t distinguish between students who took the test
in-person and those who took it remotely, but it did find higher rates
of attrition among Black and Hispanic students, students with lower
academic achievement and students from schools with higher
concentrations of low-income students.
Failing to account for such participation gaps could lead districts to
“underestimate the magnitude of achievement decline,” potentially
resulting in “the under-provision of support and services to the
neediest students,” the authors warn.
Other studies suggest the missing students are more likely to be
attending school online. In December, nearly three quarters of urban
school districts — which disproportionately enroll low-income students
and students of color — were still operating in fully remote mode,
compared to only a third of suburban districts, according to The Center
on Reinventing Public Education.
In an effort to test as many remote learners as possible, many states
are extending their testing windows, offering testing on weekends, and
testing students individually, to minimize their contact with others.
“It’s a lot of anxiety and stress in a year that has already had an unprecedented amount of stress”
Ryan Brown, spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Education
Nevada may even seek to extend its spring testing into the fall, if
students in Las Vegas still aren’t in school in the spring, said
Jonathan Moore, the state’s deputy superintendent for student
achievement. The district, which enrolls two-thirds of the Nevada’s
students, is the state’s largest and most diverse.
In nothing else, state leaders hope the Biden administration will offer
them a break from a requirement that they test 95 percent of their
students.
“I don’t think there’s a state in the nation that will be able to have
a 95 percent participation rate this year,” said Wright, the
Mississippi state superintendent. “There’s going to have to be a big
asterisk in the trend line.”
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