Education First documented the proliferation of excessive and harmful testing in American K-8 public schools in its report Rethinking the Test Pile: A National Study of K-8 Academic Assessments. Students take as many as 88 distinct state and district mandated assessments and sit for 222 hours of testing from grades K-8. This costs, on average, $2.5 million per district, $40 million per state, and between $3-5 billion nationally. The volume of testing does not even correlate to proficiency or growth on ESSA mandated state summative accountability tests and are implemented with little evidence of instructional value or connection to curriculum or instructional strategy. And vulnerable student populations–English language learners, students of color, and poor students–are the most tested, and thus receive the least classroom instruction.
FairTest believes that the only way to address this problem is to move our accountability system and academic assessment landscape in an entirely different direction. Large scale assessments should not have high stakes consequences to remove the incentives to constantly progress monitor and prepare students for end of year tests. Their function should be limited to taking the temperature of state and local education systems to see if students and subgroups of students are meeting basic subject matter benchmarks. They should not be used to promote daily learning. Assessments in furtherance of learning — quizzes, essays, projects, presentations, exams — should be determined at the level of the classroom, school, and perhaps the district. Assessments should be authentic to learning and largely performance-based.
Accountability should be reframed to hold schools and districts accountable to students and parents rather than to higher levels of government. Through reciprocal local accountability that does not rely largely on state standardized test scores but on a whole host of metrics that communities care about and need and want for their young people, the incentive to grow the test pile would be neutered. And public schools are more likely to be places of joy, caring, deeper learning and true achievement.
We would like to see further study of the reasons behind the choices being made at the district and school level identified by Education First, as well as inquiry into what students, teachers and schools actually want and need in the way of assessments.
Read our full report, “Instead of Rethinking the Test Pile, Maybe We Should Blow It Up”: FairTest Analysis of and Recommendation from Education First Report