The pandemic took a devastating toll on the nation’s students. A recent Harvard study estimated that students who stayed home for most of the 2020–2021 school year lost 50 percent of a typical year’s learning in math. Earlier this month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported the biggest drop in 9-year-old reading performance in 30 years and the first-ever drop in math. In the pandemic’s wake, parents and policymakers desperately need good information on how students and schools are faring. At the same time, concerns about student well-being mean that no one wants to sacrifice learning time or human connection in the name of endless test-taking.
That creates a conundrum: We need the information that testing can provide but without the burdens that testing imposes. To assist policymakers and educational leaders with that project, we just released a new volume, “Reflections on the Future of K–12 Assessment and Accountability.” It includes chapters by a dynamic collection of contributors from the worlds of research, policy, and practice. The volume doesn’t offer a unified agenda, but the collection does offer a raft of ideas for how to make testing and accountability less burdensome and more responsive to parent and student needs. Here are three:
Invest in creating low-burden, high-value assessments. Existing tests that provide a lot of value tend to demand a lot of time and focus (like Advanced Placement tests), while those which are less burdensome tend to provide little value to individual students and educators (like the National Assessment of Educational Progress). Jack Buckley, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, observes that there’s currently no widely used assessment that’s both low-burden and high-value. The disruptions brought by COVID-19 offer an opportunity to remedy that: States should start administering a series of interim assessments, rather than a single annual summative assessment, providing parents and educators up-to-date snapshots of student performance.
Design accountability systems for the real world. During the pandemic, as students flooded to schools of choice, many schools took on students whose learning had been disrupted. Too often, accountability measures aren’t well-designed to reflect the resulting challenges. Michael Horn, author of From Reopen to Reinvent, argues that alternative schools (which largely serve dropouts or transfers) are typically judged in ways that punish them for taking on these students. The result is they get judged based on standards which don’t reflect the progress of the students they serve. Horn argues alternative schools should be evaluated based on a basket of measures, including learning outcomes, program completion, placement upon leaving, post-graduation earnings, and student satisfaction.
Learn the lessons of the past. It’s tempting for policymakers to use the pandemic as a reason to either jettison testing or go whole-hog on a new accountability push. But any proposals should be informed by what we’ve gotten right and wrong over the past two decades. University of Oklahoma professor Deven Carlson notes, for instance, that No Child Left Behind got a lot right back in 2002: It shifted the focus from inputs to student outcomes, highlighted troubling racial and economic disparities, and spurred the development of reliable education data systems. Yet those successes were largely undone by wildly unrealistic expectations, a narrow focus on reading and math scores, and ham-handed accountability systems. We need to learn from those missteps.
The contributors offer plenty more sensible, forward-looking starting points for policymakers, educators, and parents asking how assessment and accountability might better serve students as we emerge from the pandemic. It’s well worth checking out.
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