The end of Testing?

I have a sneaking feeling that federally-mandated, high-stakes testing might be over.

This summer, when my home state filed a formal request with the Department of Education to waive mandated standardized testing for this school year on account of all of the challenges and expenses with which the Covid-19 pandemic would burden schools, I began to dream of what I would do with a full YEAR without high-stakes testing.   Even as a teacher who is relatively ok with testing, it still occupies, as I explained in another post, about 70 lost classes per year for students in certain grade levels, and I looked forward to the great things I could do with all that time back.

So far, the Department of Education hasn’t granted that waiver.  Nonetheless, I think it might be possible that this pandemic spells the end for federal accountability testing.

Not for this year.

For good.

To be clear, I'm only speaking about the once-per-year, federally-mandated testing, not any additional local or national standardized tests that individual districts choose to give. Additionally, this isn’t about my personal opinions on federally-mandated testing. This is what I think I read in the tea leaves, so to speak.  When I piece together some of the changes I see - big and small - in public education and in society this past year, it becomes harder and harder for me to see high-stakes, standardized testing surviving.  

Allow me to make the case. 

Why Do We Have High-Stakes Testing to Begin With?​

 Before I explain why I think high-stakes testing might be on the way out, I need to explain why we do it in the first place.  The short answer is, it’s the law.  In 2001, back when political parties occasionally did things together, two Republican senators and two Democratic senators brought the No Child Left Behind Act before congress, and it was overwhelmingly supported by the House and Senate, and signed into law by President Bush.  The law mandated that public schools assess students in grades 3-8 and meet certain “benchmark” passing rates for each student demographic group.  In 2015, the No Child Left Behind Act was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was similarly overwhelmingly supported in congress and signed into law by President Obama. This new law replaced certain failed and unpopular provisions of its predecessor, but left the yearly high-stakes testing mandate in place.

President Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act,​ backed by sponsoring members of Congress and unsuspecting students 

President Obama signs the Every Student Succeeds Act, surrounded by backers and students who probably think they're getting out of more than they are

Even in 2001, the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers and schools wasn’t a new idea.  From what I can gather, it can be traced back as far as 1916, to a widely-used textbook at the time called Public School Administration, by Ellwood Cubberley.  Using “objective,” metric data to evaluate employees, departments, companies, and government agencies has been on the rise in almost every type of institution over that time period, as well.

What Has Changed During The Pandemic?

Since high-stakes testing is the law, its disappearance would necessitate that the law be changed.  Looking at the massive ways in which 2020 affected governments, society, and schools, I see ten factors that, to me, might actually make this happen. 

1. Money

High-stakes, state-wide testing is expensive.  Really expensive.  Most numbers I can find show that, depending on the state, it costs between $7 and $15 per student, for a total price tag somewhere between 1 and 2 billion dollars nationwide. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has seemingly shone a light on the additional funding schools need.  The first Cares Act provided $13 billion dollars to schools to catch up on technology and safety, and the Cares 2 Act provided another $54 billion.  A lot of this money, of course, was to alleviate specific pandemic-related shortfalls, but some of this money is starting to be viewed as simply a necessity for new-normal operations and for filling in after long-standing underfunding at the state and local levels. On top of what has been spent already, expensive programs to mitigate learning loss are about to be launched across the country, too. It seems unlikely to me that the federal government would send schools $60 billion dollars, then turn around and ask them to spend $2 billion of it to comply with standardized testing rules that it could simply choose to waive or eliminate.

         2. Student experience

In Georgia’s request for a testing waiver, State Superintendent Richard Woods wrote:

“When students enter the classroom this fall, they will be dealing with the ongoing effects of a global crisis and the trauma of necessary, but unprecedented, isolation. In the midst of this, school districts will be implementing intensive protocols to ensure the safety of their students and staff. We believe our students' and teachers' focus belongs on making it through this challenge together and addressing learning loss, not on the pressure of a high-stakes standardized test."

He astutely points out, in addressing “learning loss,” that students across the state simply will not have equal experiences with this pandemic, and we don’t need high-stakes tests to tell us that.  That’s true this year, and it will be true for years to come.  The inequality in educational opportunity will have been even more massive than usual after more than a year of fully or partially closed schools, and it seems clear to everyone that making up for that learning loss will be a long road.

          3. Student and teacher mental health

This pandemic has made very clear the mental health toll that the school environment takes on students and teachers alike.  High-stakes testing is a big part of that, and people finally seem to be listening.  

​          4. Attitude toward the work of teachers and schools

​The public attitude toward the teaching profession has very quickly turned from “these are bureaucrats with cushy government benefits who only work nine months a year” to “I can barely manage educating my own kids, and these people have been managing 30-40 at a time?”  The value teachers add to society is really on display right now.  For all the school-at-home jokes (right), the change in attitude is real.

High-stakes testing was originally instituted, in part, with the belief that teachers weren’t really trying very hard and needed to be held accountable for their time.  I don’t think most Americans see it that way any more.
​
          5. It’s really only popular among real-estate agents and elected officials

In truth, standardized testing has only ever been popular among real-estate agents and elected officials.  Administrators are saddled with it. Only a handful of teachers believe in it.  Students abhor it.  Whenever I discuss a student’s state testing scores with even the most school-minded parents, they don’t show much interest, either. Test scores help sell houses and give elected officials numbers to spout to either scare or appease us.  Nobody else, as far as I can tell, seems very interested in them.

          6. Most of its benefits came a long time ago, and then stopped

Students appear to have made modest gains in math and slight gains in reading during the first eight years of accountability testing (roughly 2002-2009), but achievement tapered off at that point and hasn’t moved again since despite another decade of high-intensity accountability.  So while there was perhaps an initial bump, test-score accountability hasn’t driven much improvement in a long time.​

​*nationsreportcard.gov

When it comes to narrowing achievement gaps - the second major goal of the accountability movement - there appear to be three main outcomes:

• Racial achievement gaps have narrowed modestly for students above the poverty line.
• There has been almost no change in achievement gap between students above vs below the poverty line
• Many, many states have wider achievement gaps today than they did at the onset of the initiative

In short, the idea that a lack of school and teacher accountability was holding students back may have been a reasonable hypothesis at the time, but it hasn't turned out to be true.

          7. Teacher shortage

I don’t think that accountability testing is driving the teacher shortage, but it certainly isn’t helping.  ​

According to the Economic Policy Institute, there are about 250,000 fewer teachers than there were in 2008, and about 450,000 fewer than 2008 if you account for population growth.  In that same time period, the number of students completing teacher education programs is down more than 25%.

In my experience, high-stakes testing is pretty high on the list of reasons some teachers are leaving the profession early.  They don’t like the lost teaching time, the anxiety it creates in the students, the amount of additional work and meetings that come along with it, the insane security measures surrounding them, or the general attitude that test score obsession has overtaken any and everything in schools. Similarly, young people considering the education profession at this point grew up in the high-stakes testing era and weren’t exactly enamored with it.  People have long gone into teaching to change lives, but many young people today simply didn't have a school experience that made them think the teaching profession is the place to do that.

          8. Decreasing faith in metrics

Accountability metrics haven’t just proliferated in schools, they’ve proliferated everywhere - in medicine, universities, business, law enforcement…. Everywhere.  Most giant trends that revolutionize our understanding of complex organizations have a tendency to get taken too far, and the use of accountability metrics is no exception.  

Metrics, it turned out, are helpful to a point, but in time they tend to have inevitable, negative consequences if overused.  One of the commonly taught adages in organizational metrics is called Goodhart’s Law, which states

                     When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Accountability testing is intended to measure students’ educational accomplishments.  However when the tool used to measure educational accomplishment becomes the goal, rather than just the tool, then gaming the system becomes just as valuable as actually educating students.  We’ve seen cheating scandals.  We’ve seen states lower their standards to raise test scores.  We see low-achieving students get shuffled and relocated to spread out their impact on certain schools’ testing tabs.  We see students not assigned to services they need to avoid placing them in groups with hard-to-meet testing benchmarks.  That’s Goodhart’s Law.  That kind of thing is inevitable when a measure becomes a target.

For a deeper look at how overuse and abuse of metrics are being understood in a wide range of organizations, I recommend this excellent book published in 2018.

          9. Attitude of State Governments

I’m going to speak specifically about my home state of Georgia here, but there’s a good chance that what I’m going to say follows for many other states, too.  To be frank, it is clear that my state-level government doesn’t place much value on high-stakes testing anymore.  Over the last couple of years, they’ve cut testing to the bare minimum required by the federal government.  It has also given substantial raises to teachers and had intended even bigger ones in the wake of the teacher strikes in other states a few years back.  Both our governor and state superintendent seem to be of a mind that they want to make Georgia a place where teaching is a job people want to do.  Neither seem to see standardized testing as part of that plan, beyond what the federal government above them requires.  Which brings us to….

          10. A new presidential administration atop the federal government

...the big one.  Accountability testing is federal law, so it has no chance of disappearing without action from the federal government, which, it just so happens, has just changed hands at a time when schools are, for once, front and center in the national discussion.  

The new First Lady is a college professor. The likely new Secretary of Education is a former teacher and principal.  President Biden - who voted for No Child Left Behind in 2001 - is on record as saying “it was a mistake…. I would scrap it.   You need better teachers. You need smaller classrooms. You need to start kids earlier. It's all basic.”

 From what I can gather, the new Biden administration does have goals for public schools, which appear to be:

1. Addressing budget shortfalls
2. Investing in innovation
3. Addressing systemic racism
4. Restoring faith in the Department of Education
5. Updating infrastructure

I don’t see high-stakes testing driving that agenda the way it has past agendas of the last twenty years.  Public education tends to be something new presidents make a one-time splash early in their tenures.  It just so happens that a lot is going on with public education right as we bring in a new president.  It’s an opportune time for a splash.

I have absolutely no idea if the new presidential administration would consider dropping the federal, yearly, high-stakes testing mandate.  But I see ten reasons to think it might.  And if it did, I just don’t see anyone down the chain pushing back.

Except for maybe real estate agents.

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