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Dreamstime
K-12 Dive
How are districts prepping for an unprecedented assessment season?
As school leaders await word from their states following recent
Department of Education guidance, their districts are preparing for
multiple scenarios.
Natalie Gross
March 1, 2021
On March 3, 2020, a deadly tornado hit parts of Tennessee, wiping out
two buildings in the Wilson County School District and damaging many
students’ homes.
Later that month, the novel coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools
across the state — and the country — and students in the Nashville
suburb would go without instruction until August, when the district was
able to establish both hybrid and fully remote learning options, said
Wilson County Director of Schools Donna Wright.
Early on, Wright told teachers any assessments would be “soft,” or not punitive in nature.
Wright and other Tennessee superintendents went to state legislators to
ask for the same treatment for 2021 standardized assessments,
maintaining if students were required to take the tests, districts
would be held harmless for the results, which are typically used to
inform things like school letter grades and teacher evaluations. And in
January, the state legislature passed a law to that effect for schools
that get at least 80% of their students to participate.
Wright said she was generally pleased with the decision, because she
finds the data useful for determining where students are — especially
those who have been fully remote since the fall — as long as it’s not
used for high-stakes accountability measures, per usual.
But the ruling hasn’t come without controversy.
“Educators and students already face many new challenges and additional
stress in the coming year, it would be unfair and inappropriate to put
them through the state’s high-stakes summative testing system,”
Tennessee Education Association President Beth Brown said in a
statement on behalf of the union, which advocated for skipping the
tests altogether. “Moreover, because of the wide disruption in
instruction there will be no validity or reliability in TNReady
data.”
The Tennessee debate is a snapshot of what school districts everywhere
are facing going into the 2021 assessment season, with numbers of
educators and education advocacy organizations falling on both sides of
the issue.
But while states received a waiver from the federal government to
forego the assessments in the 2019-20 school year, the Biden
administration announced last week the tests will be required this
year, with the caveat districts may have flexibilities such as more
time to administer them.
“I think folks are still really wrestling with this. It’s interesting
because every state context is different, and how the pandemic has hit
every single state is so different,” said Abby Javurek, vice president
of solution vision and impact at NWEA, a nonprofit focused on
assessment. Javurek previously oversaw assessments and accountability
at the South Dakota Department of Education.
“I don’t think that anybody is really advocating for or excited
about the premise of asking kids that haven’t been in school to come in
and take tests,” she said. “I think what we hear from the district
level is that they need the data this year to know where kids are, and
that we also need to understand that, especially given the different
context that all of our students are learning in, our interpretation
and our comparison that we do with the data may not be interchangeable.”
The U.S. Department of Education’s guidance, issued by Acting Assistant
Secretary Ian Rosenblum, emphasizes “the importance of flexibility in
the administration of statewide assessments.”
It allows states to consider administering a shortened version of the
tests, offer remote administration where feasible, and/or extend the
testing window to the greatest extent practicable, including by
offering multiple testing windows or extending the testing window into
the summer or beginning of next school year.
“We do have some states that are, at least as of now, expecting to go
forth with testing this year that feel like they have the
infrastructure that’s there to do that; there’s enough face-to-face
instruction going on that they can plan that,” said Javurek said.
Yet others are considering a variety of permitted formats. And as
school leaders await more guidance from their states, their districts
are preparing for multiple scenarios.
More time and remote accommodations — yet questions remain
In New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy announced plans to proceed with
testing even before the Biden administration’s announcement,
Superintendent Kenyon Cummings of Wildwood Public Schools is unsure
what that will look like, especially in districts like his on a hybrid
schedule. He said now, more than ever, teachers need all the
instructional time they can get.
Though the standardized assessments would’ve originally taken place in
March, the state is offering districts more time to prepare. But
otherwise, as of his recent interview with K-12 Dive, Cummings said
there hasn’t been a lot of guidance.
“It’s a puzzle in a more normal year … but that’s going to be even more
challenging now, in that you’re trying to schedule cohort A, cohort B
and your students who are still remote because they have concerns about
the virus in schools,” he said.
Cummings, who is opposed to using assessments for high-stakes purposes,
said remote testing opens another can of worms with questions about
student privacy and who will be in charge of proctoring.
The Education Law Center, based in New Jersey, came out against the
state education department’s plans for an “untested and highly
problematic computer-based ‘remote option’” which, the group said,
“raises issues of the reliability and validity of the results, the
security of the data, and the privacy of student information.”
“The assessments had an issue prior to the pandemic but now that we’re
heading into this conversation about whether or not we should have
these assessments in the spring, I think a whole new set of questions
and concerns has come up,” Cummings said.
Shorter tests
Some states are exploring shortened tests that will provide a
high-level overview of where students are, Javurek said. She added,
however, that shorter formats can provide less detail about where
exactly a student may be struggling, though educators still “get a
pretty good measure of where students are in that domain.”
California rolled out plans in November for shorter tests to replace
its English-language arts and math Smarter Balanced Assessments in 3rd
through 8th and 11th grades this school year. The shorter versions of
the tests cut down about two hours of test time, depending on grade
level.
Moving forward without waivers
Meanwhile, New York and Ohio, among others, that previously planned for waivers are figuring out what to do next.
Randy Squier, superintendent of Coxsackie-Athens Central School
District in New York’s Hudson Valley, said the state’s Board of Regents
will meet in mid-March to issue emergency regulations regarding
testing. Logistically, he said the tests shouldn’t be much of a hurdle
for his schools because 80% of students are attending class in-person
on a normal schedule, and the district is not anticipating having to
administer tests to remote learners.
“I can imagine for the hybrid schools that only have the kids twice a
week, they’re going to have a very complex testing schedule,” he said,
adding that will lead to inequities among test-takers.
“Every district is going to be doing it differently,” he said. “And that’s nobody’s fault.”
Read this and other stories at K-12 Dive
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