10 Jun State test results are still too d*mn slow
By Dale Chu
In April, Alaska published its 2023 state assessment results, making it the final one to publicly release its assessment data for that academic year. This came at a time when students were preparing to take the 2024 exams. Which is to say, states continue to be notoriously slow when it comes to publicly sharing their test scores—with Maine, New York, and Vermont among the most egregious offenders.
But they’re not all laggards. For two consecutive years, Florida and Tennessee have been the first two states out of the gate. Indiana released its data a whole month earlier (July 2023 vs. August 2022), and Maryland bested itself by an entire three months (September 2023 vs. December 2022). Typically speaking, the span between the first state releasing its data and the last runs from June through April. States can and should do better.
The post below was written by Chad Aldeman, a national policy expert and my friend and colleague at EduProgress.org. Chad has chronicled the glacial pace at which states release their test data and believes the Buckeye State could provide a model solution. I wanted to share Chad’s post here to help amplify his call for getting state test results back to students and families as quickly as possible.
It’s Testing Season. When Will Parents See Their Child’s Results?
By Chad Aldeman. Originally published on the EduProgress: Unpacked blog.
About 25 million kids will sit down to take a state test this spring. When can parents reasonably expect to see their child’s results:
A. Within 2 weeks!
B. By the end of June
C. By the start of the next school year
D. Next fall maybe?
“A” is a tempting answer. After all, kids take the tests on computers, which allows for instantaneous scoring. It would also be the most helpful, because it would give parents time to make different decisions about how their child should spend their time this summer… or whether they need to look for another school for their child.
Unfortunately, if history is any guide the correct answer is probably more like D.
For the last two years I’ve been tracking when states release the results from their spring tests. In 2023, only one state—Florida—released their results by the end of June. Another four states released their results in July, and 13 states made it by the end of August. The school year starts at different times both within and across states, but it’s fair to assume that 32 states and the District of Columbia released their results after the start of the next school year.
Maine and Vermont released their results in February, 8-9 months after students took the exams.
When I first started tracking this in 2022, I thought these long time delays could just be an artifact of the COVID era. Maybe states were just slow to restart their testing systems after the pandemic?
But after seeing another year of results, I don’t see any evidence of widespread improvements.
There were some state-level changes from 2022 to 2023—Maryland got noticeably faster while New York and New Mexico got slower—but most states were remarkably similar.
Now, the dates I’m reporting here reflect the day when states release their results to the public, and some states share earlier, preliminary data with parents and educators on a private basis. However, that’s still far from a standard practice. More commonly, the results trickle down in a game of telephone from the state to districts to schools and finally to parents and other caregivers.
State tests provide a strong signal of how a student is performing academically, and parents deserve to know how their son or daughter is doing. But long time delays in getting that information back into the hands of parents is contributing to a perception gap, where parents think their child is doing better than they really are.
To fix this problem, legislators and governors should look to Ohio. Last year, they passed a new requirement that schools provide parents with their child’s state exam results no later than June 30th. Other states should consider similar rules to speed up their timelines and get results back to parents as quickly as possible.
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