State Testing: How Did we Get Here?

If the question is “How did we arrive at the current state of affairs in state testing?” the short, immediate, and correct answer, is the federal government. You can argue that the marriage between the federal government and state testing began with the evaluation requirements for Title I under ESEA in the 1960s. Then the feds began to exert more pressure on states under IASA in the 1990s.

When that didn’t work, they brought the hammer down with NCLB. They doubled down with the Waivers and ESSA, all while trying to convince states that they were actually backing off.  Perception and reality become blurred when you’ve been in the state testing matrix too long.

Add to all of that, specific legislation and regulations related to students with disabilities and English learners. And let’s not forget, educator evaluation. Seriously, never forget what happened with educator evaluation.

The answer to our first question, therefore, is the feds.

It’s probably not sufficient for our purposes, however, to stop there.

If we want to bring about change by, let’s say, proposing changes to federal law, it’s not enough simply to credit (or blame) the feds for the current state of affairs in state testing, we need to dig a little deeper, do our best impersonation of Cindy Lou Who (original TV special version) and ask, “Why, federal government, Why?”

Why all the clauses and

(1.i) subclauses upon

(1.i.a) sub-subclauses

(1.ii.c) laying out requirements for state testing?

            (1.iv.c.2) Why?

Digging Below the Surface

In the true spirit of state testing, we can ask why our country has chosen to do this for us in the form of a multiple-choice question.

1. The motivation behind federal requirements for state testing is __________.

a. accountability
b. control
c. equity
d. excellence

You got me. It’s a trick question, and not a very well-constructed one at that. I may have to open up that Handbook of Test Development I’ve been using to prop up my MacBook and refresh my item writing skills.

I could have added an “all of the above” option or made it a multiple-select item; or I could have gone into full item-writer mode (circa 1995) and asked for the “primary” motivation or sought the “BEST” explanation.

All of the factors listed above have contributed to some extent to the federal requirements for state testing. I’m sure that everyone reading this has their own favorite among the factors listed. That’s the beauty of federal legislation, there’s something in there for everyone – even if what’s in it for you is simply a reason for you to oppose it vigorously.

It’s also true that the relative importance of each of these factors has waxed and waned over time, and their meaning, or at least the way that they have been interpreted, may have changed several times, but these four broad categories have remained fairly constant through the years.

Let’s take a brief look at each:

• Equity – Equity seems the most straightforward. ESEA was one of the major pieces of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, and equity or civil rights has been at the forefront of each subsequent reauthorization of ESEA since then. And yes, from the beginning, federal education legislation has been equity, not equality. Of course, equity is at the center of arguments for and against current state testing practices which makes thinking about next steps all the more interesting.
• Accountability – Accountability is one of the factors whose meaning/interpretation has shifted over the years. In the beginning, the primary issue was fiscal accountability; that is, tests were a mechanism to ensure that federal funds were being spent wisely and effectively. That underlying interpretation remains the same, but we long ago stopped directly connecting the state assessment and school accountability requirements of federal legislation with all of the money provided and programs supported by the legislation with the intent of improving student learning.
• Control – One of the reasons for that disconnect is that the feds leveraged Title I funding and the specific subset of students it was designed to support into assessment, reporting, and accountability requirements that apply to all students and schools. That sleight of hand is often submitted as the smoking gun by those who view control over public education and local curriculum as the primary motivation behind federal requirements for state testing.
• Excellence – Excellence was added to equity as a driving force behind federal policy in the 1980s. That the push for excellence was spurred by A Nation at Risk is often cited as further evidence of ill intent by the control conspiracists. The intent behind the introduction of excellence into the picture is a red herring, much less important than the fact that the focus on excellence begat state content standards and achievement standards which begat the Common Core State Standards and next generation assessments, but never really begat a clear definition and understanding of what excellence is, and certainly never begat a much needed discussion of how that concept of excellence should be applied to all students.

For better or worse, these four factors are still very much at play.

Any attempt to reform state testing, therefore, is going to have to address concerns, real and imagined, in each of these areas – concerns which should be largely overlapping but are often viewed as conflicting.

Digging just a bit deeper, of course, brings us to that much closer to the underlying issue fueling each of those four factors, the third rail issue, the issue which, until recently, was only whispered in polite company: the root causes of the ongoing discrepancies in the quality of educational inputs and outcomes within and across states – and differences in educational attainment across subgroups within and across schools, school districts, and states.

On top of those real discrepancies, add in the very real fear of a real or imagined honesty gap; that is, the belief that left to their own devices teachers, schools, districts, and states are either unwilling or incapable of providing parents and students with an accurate picture of student achievement.

The list of factors discussed here is not exhaustive, of course, but I think that we can all agree that it is exhausting.

Regardless of how exhausting it may be, however, even when focused on the “big picture” questions we have to dig still a little deeper when trying to understand exactly where we are with state testing and how we got here.

Just a Little Bit Deeper Now – The Devil is in the “Details”

Without wandering into the weeds of state testing there are a few “details” that qualify as big picture issues that we need to consider for a full understanding of the current state of state testing and how we got here.  A quick list in no particular order:

• Why is there so much emphasis on testing reading, mathematics, and science?

Title I and the amount of state testing required by the feds is part of the answer, but not the complete answer as to why those subjects are tested and many states have abandoned tests in other areas such as social studies, the arts, health. It was never the argument or belief that teaching reading, mathematics, and science was the only task a school had to perform or that test scores in those subject areas gave a complete picture of school quality or effectiveness.

• Why do we report individual student scores?

State testing, like NAEP, did not always provide individual student results. Why did we start doing that (long before NCLB, by the way)? How dependent has the industry, policymakers, and other stakeholders become on receiving student test scores, achievement level classifications, growth scores, etc. each year and tracking student performance across years?

• Why do we test at the end of the year?

NAEP is administered in the middle of the school year. State tests used to be administered at various points during the school year (e.g., fall, winter, spring), although late spring has always been popular. In reality, “end-of-year” testing is often not that close to the end of the school year at all, for any number of reasons; and the capacity demands of computer-based testing pushed the testing window even earlier into the spring/school year for many states.

• Why do we think that it is important to administer the same test to “all” students?

This is a different question than why it is important to include all students in the state assessment program.  Having made that clarification, there are several possible answers to this question and some are better than others. Administering the “same test” to all students is not a simple task. For many years, the biggest issue associated with offering accommodations on state tests was not the impact on standardization or comparability, it was the impact on efficiency – one of the primary benefits of large-scale testing. Technology has eased many efficiency concerns associated with accommodations, but it is still critical to understand why we think administering the same test to all students is important, particularly in the face of calls for greater personalization and student choice.

• Why do we still rely so heavily on selected-response items?

Again, lots of possible answers to this question, each of which has different implications for moving forward.

Like the four factors discussed in the previous section, this list is not exhaustive. I hope that it does, however, demonstrate, just how many decisions have been made to shape the current state of state testing.

Starting with a better understanding of those decisions – whether they were made consciously or not – is not a guarantee that we will do better next time, but it’s a step in the right direction when we begin to address the remaining three big questions:

• What information do we want/need to get out of state testing?
• What is the best way to get that information?
• What are our next steps?

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay