Where’s the (assessment) data?

24 Mar Where’s the (assessment) data?

By Dale Chu

With testing season right around the corner and uncertainty brewing around how state exams will be administered this spring, it felt timely to kick off this series on the present and future of statewide annual academic assessments. Coinciding with this effort is a refresh of the AssessmentHQ platform after a months-long scouring of state education agency websites for the most up-to-date numbers on student testing participation and performance. There is an imperative to understand this information now, especially as schools and students emerge from two years of pandemic-constrained learning.

Future posts in this series will highlight states that did a particularly good job of making this information user-friendly and easily accessible, but overall, this task proved to be a challenging one given the wide variety of ways states chose to report their assessment results—to the extent they were reported at all. As Clara Peller might have asked, “Where’s the (assessment) data?” Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that finding this information across fifty states and Washington, D.C. was second only to this guy’s job with regard to ease of convenience. The waning popularity of standardization notwithstanding, there is still something to be said about providing data in a comprehensible manner to the public.

The vacuum of good information about our education system following two years without quality testing data is matched only by a lack of leadership, another topic I’ll delve into. Given the importance of annual assessments as a tool for strategically allocating recovery resources – including the $190 billion federal windfall – it’s a wonder why Uncle Sam hasn’t done more to shine a spotlight on how states have been collecting and reporting their academic assessment data. There’s little doubt that the feds have this information at their fingertips and yet they’ve been sitting on their hands with it while some states drag their feet.

Last spring, Washington, D.C. was the only jurisdiction that was granted a bye from the federal education law’s annual testing requirement, but states like Colorado, New Mexico, and California, among others, were allowed to wade into some really murky waters. In short, the U.S. Department of Education allowed some states to make a mockery of the equity guardrails enshrined in federal statute. With little political incentive to take a firmer stand, will the feds similarly shirk their responsibilities this time around? Will state officials keep their word about testing all students this spring? No matter what the federal government does or doesn’t do, states that are serious about getting their students back on track should move forward by resuming annual state testing this year. In my next piece, I’ll describe what that might look like.