Breaking the assessment stalemate

12 Jun Breaking the assessment stalemate

By Dale Chu

The fine folks at FutureEd, specifically Lynn Olson and Tom Toch, just released a thoughtful new report titled, “None of the Above: A New Vision for State Standardized Testing.” (Intrepid readers of this blog will recall my interview with Olson a few years back.) The authors provide a primer on the history of standardized testing in the U.S., and explain how the intersecting forces of policy and politics have led to today’s stalemated debate on the future of assessment. 

The cause of the gridlock, as Olson and Toch see it, is the desire for state tests to serve two disparate and largely (completely?) incompatible roles: accountability versus instructional utility. I’m not sure this is really the core obstacle (more on that below), but it’s certainly a significant one, and their solution for slicing through the knot is a “two-tiered system” that attempts to dial down the stakes by decoupling state testing from federal accountability.

Notably, their proposal—which Olson and Toch acknowledge isn’t new—would require hitting the brakes on annual testing at the individual student level. Instead, state tests would gauge district and school level progress while local tests would handle the rest. In their words:

State tests would focus on aggregate data for policymakers and education leaders to monitor educational opportunities and indirectly support instruction by providing resources for high-quality curriculum and professional learning. Local and classroom-based assessments, i.e., second tier assessments, would provide the fine-grained, timely information needed by teachers, students, and families.

This adjustment would open up room for matrix sampling (a la NAEP, in which any individual student takes only a portion of the entire test) to reduce the footprint of state exams, and address the concerns of, among others, some testing experts—one of whom is quoted in the report as saying, “Stop testing every single student every single year. Go to a sampling approach for school accountability and then, maybe, in key grades assess every kid every year. This over-testing, nobody wants that.”

All of this is well and good, and Olson and Toch make a sound and reasoned case for their recommendations. That said, I can’t help but feel that most of the criticisms of standardized testing today—they’re too, pick your adjective, “expensive”, “time-consuming”, “punitive”, “racist”—are red herrings that have little to do with the craft of assessment. Put another way, there’s an assumption behind their two-tiered system that what the sector wants is better technical solutions and that those will be enough to ease the politics. 

I’m not so sure. For better or worse, assessment and accountability have been fused at the hip, and trying to separate them could be more trouble than it’s worth. Heck, if Moses himself were able to divide the two and hand us an alternative to what states currently use, it’s unclear whether this would do much to break today’s assessment stalemate. But skepticism aside, FutureEd’s new report deserves attention, and their laudable focus on solutions is something we need more of. It’s a worthwhile addition to the debate regardless of how aimlessly we continue to spin our wheels.