This week, the state assessment community gathers in Denver for the annual CCSSO National Conference on Student Assessment. The theme of the 2025 conference:
MAXIMIZING IMPACT: LEVERAGING ASSESSMENT AND
ACCOUNTABILITY TO DRIVE STUDENT LEARNING
Now that’s quite the bold (and boldly presented) statement for a field that for the better part of the past decade has found itself either in a defensive posture with its back against the wall or practicing self-flagellation to atone for its sins, past and present. At the very least, it seems a far cry from the tone of one of the most widely attended webinars of the spring, The Case for State Testing, which featured state assessment experts and policymakers doing their best to justify its existence.
I could rationalize that the conference theme is a manifestation of cornered animal syndrome which has beset the field these past 150 days or so – particularly inside the Beltway. Given the life cycle of a conference, however, I assume that this theme predates the events of last fall and winter.
So, how am I to interpret this forceful statement?
What’s In a Theme?
To be honest, I have never given much thought to conference themes. I knew which conferences I wanted to attend. I submitted proposals, and as the years went by they were accepted 6, 7, 8, and then 9 times out of 10 – which was more a reflection of changing times than it was changes in the quality of my work and thinking. Nevertheless, conference themes and slogans do give you a bit of a window into the mind of a field or an organization.
Looking back, we had lots of themes related to access and inclusion in the early 2000s. Those topics were followed a spate of themes with buzzwords like high quality, technology, next generation, progress, growth, and excellence. Most recently, the pendulum has swung toward equity, opportunity, social justice, fairness, personalization, etc. There’s an ebb and flow as one topic or another dominates the educational Zeitgeist.
In some cases, however, as with the 2025 NCSA theme, there’s something deeper at play, a reflection of the core values and beliefs of a field.
Let’s begin with MAXIMIZING IMPACT. That’s a tricky one. Many would argue that educational testing, particularly standards-based state-testing in the era of accountability, already has an impact that far exceeds its worth or its capacity to contribute to educational policy and particularly to instruction. MAXIMIZING IMPACT can also come across as a very inward-facing, self-centered type of goal as opposed to say something like maximizing opportunity, maximizing information and knowledge, or even maximining efficiency.
Moving on, LEVERAGING has a couple of things going against it. First, in 2025, the term leveraging has long since jumped the shark into the jargon, buzzword bin of action words. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the actual definition of leveraging plays right into the hands of those aforementioned critics who already believe that assessment and accountability have an out-sized impact on education. Give me a test short and cheap enough and I can move the world. Despite good faith on the part of those using it here, I’m not sure that we can salvage leverage.
Which brings us to DRIVE STUDENT LEARNING. Come now, do we really want assessment and accountability to drive student learning? Have we learned nothing from the past quarter century? Could our level of self-awareness possibly be that low? Even viewed from the inside, the phrase DRIVE STUDENT LEARNING gives off far too many technocratic, measurement expert with all the answers, man with the plan, alpha male, mansplaining vibes. Perhaps Women In Measurement can devote a webinar to workshopping that one for the field.
To be fair, the finer print in the conference theme does use softer language that attempts to cast assessment and accountability in a more supporting role:
By strategically utilizing assessments, educators and policymakers can gather valuable data to inform instruction, identify student needs and measure progress. Accountability systems use assessment information, along with other data, to support schools and educators in allocating resources, providing valuable information to the public, and guiding school improvement strategies. These actions help build a more holistic system of support for students.
But let’s face it, nobody reads the fine print.
How then, do we come up with a kinder, gentler, more compassionate way to share our core values, promote our work, and foster good feelings.
Putting Our Best Foot Forward
With all due respect to the marketing gurus within educational testing, I think that we probably need help from the outside. To put it bluntly, lowercase letters, AI-generated photos and videos, and the color purple just don’t seem like enough. Period.
We could try to steal, I mean borrow, no adapt (yes, adapt) from the corporate world.
Educational Testing: It’s The Real Thing
That does have a nice, refreshing, bubbly ring to it. Only problem is that tests never have been, never are, and never will be the “real thing” no matter how much psychometricians would like that to be the case. At our best, our tests are imperfect indicators and predictors of the “real thing” that exists in students outside of the testing environment. Please remember that.
Better Living Through Testing
The more technical alternative, of course, would be Better Living Through Psychometrics. Still has a bit too much of that DRIVE STUDENT LEARNING vibe and also seems just a bit too aspirational for us. Let’s start with better informed decisions and work up from there.
Moving on from the corporate world…
To Thine Own Test Be True
Or in honor and memory of Brian Wilson, perhaps the more popularized version Be True To Your Test. I like the sentiment, but it’s probably more appropriate as an internal motivator than an outward-facing theme or slogan.
Psychometrician, Do No Harm
I did use this phrase as the title for the post that kicked off this blog back in April 2018, and I still think that it has merit as a tenet for the field. Like the previous option, however, it’s a bit too internal.
Which brings us to the clear winner of this little thought experiment.
To Protect and To Serve
For my money, no slogan or theme better describes our place in this world than to protect and to serve. Despite the obvious downside of already being associated with a group whose net Q Score possibly is just slightly higher than standardized tests and testing professionals, the slogan is a perfect fit – running circles around MAXIMIZING IMPACT to DRIVE STUDENT LEARNING.
It’s best feature: It bridges the Institutional – Individual Divide, that interpretation and use chasm that has vexed us since we started reporting individual scores on state tests. Think about it.
To Protect
Protecting students has been the primary purpose of large-scale, standardized, state testing since 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and Title 1. Educational testing, in general, fits nicely in a civil rights frame – protection. Equity, opportunity to learn, social justice = protection. And the primary purpose of the burgeoning sector of our field, certification and licensure: protection. You can review Kane (1994) for the distinctions between certifying and licensing, but protection is at the heart of both.
To Serve
As the arc of assessment moves from institutional uses to individuals and to supporting instruction to improve student learning, the role of educational testing is to serve; specifically, to serve teachers as a core component of instruction and teaching. As I wrote in my 2021 paper, Teaching Literacy, we do both testing and teaching a disservice when we try to separate assessment from teaching. There can be no teaching without assessment. In the context of instruction and learning, assessment literacy is part and parcel of teaching literacy. When testing to support student learning, therefore, our mindset and our tests must be laser-focused on service, on providing the information that is needed to support teachers and students. If we accomplish that, so much of the rest will fall into place.
There you have it. As you return from this year’s conferences, resume your work, and begin to think about proposals for the 2025-2026 conference season and travelling to someplace other than Denver, keep one or both of these in mind: To Protect and To Serve.
Image by Abhay Bharadwaj from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 