States have suspended standardized testing this year. Wouldn’t it be great if states suspended testing next year, too?
They should.
Let’s look into the standardized testing crystal ball and see how this could all play out in the next 12 months.
· Our students have missed the last quarter of this school year. They are behind where they should be.
· We don’t know how the start of the next school will start. Will it be a staggered start where only half the students come each day? An early start? A late start? Will there be another flare up of the pandemic in the late summer to keep school from starting?
· Where are teachers going to start their curriculum? If they start teaching the standards of the grade level as they normally do, how’s that going to go? It will be to students who didn’t get 25% of the previous year’s standards. (Yes, we’ve had remote learning in the Spring of 2020, but how successful was it?)
· Will schools, especially elementary schools where students are still building their skills base, implement a gap period where the first four to first six weeks of the new school year is dedicated to getting students caught up on the previous year’s missed work? If so, they will be behind in teaching next year’s standards. In normal years, teachers have to race to get all of the standards taught before the tests. Imagine starting in October. There’s no way they’ll be able to teach the current year standards and have the students prepared for the tests.
· Don’t forget: Students will be returning to school, whenever that is, after being out of school for @ five months. We know what happens when students return after two and half months during normal summers: there’s a lot of reviewing to wake up their brains. Now imagine a five month gap. It will be the largest gap since the dawn of the testing era.
· If schools start on time with all students, and they work at getting the cobwebs out of student brains, they might be getting back to “normal” around the end of October and into November - which is the beginning of winter and when the COVID-19 virus could return in force - and schools could be closing again. And if that happens, there’s no way state testing can occur in the spring of 2021.
· What if the states lowered their passing scores for the tests to make up for the missed time in school? If they do that, who cares about the results? There will be an asterisk next to the year’s scores. They won’t mean much.
Okay, let’s look at this another way. Let’s imagine the best case scenario where somehow schools start on time, plow through their curricula, and don’t have to close again in the next school year. Are we really going to trust the test results, whatever they might be, after so much school was missed this year? No. If the test results are good, we’ll ask, “What does this say about all of this attention to state testing when a kid can miss a fourth of the previous year and still do well on a test?” If the results are bad, we’ll say, “Yeah, well, the kid missed a fourth of the previous school year. What did we expect?” Testing will have been a waste of a lot of time, energy, and money.
If the states would step up NOW and say, “We’re not going to test in 2020-2021 because of all the uncertainty,” it would take the pressure off of the teachers and let them do what they do best from the first day of school: take care of the kids, help them get acclimated to the new normal, and help them get caught up on their learning.
And then look ahead a year and ask this: What’s going to happen with testing in 2021-2022? I’ve been writing for years that the clock was ticking on the lifespan of standardized testing. Knowledge is doubling at ever faster rates; some think it might be doubling every 12 hours now. I’ve said there was NO way our testing system as we know it would keep up with that sort of hyper-change. I knew the testing system would break down, but I thought it would collapse because of parent revolts or because policy makers finally came to their senses and realized the testing system was broken. I didn’t see it could happen because of a horrible pandemic.
We’re moving toward an education reset. Let’s hope something positive comes out of these school closures: a move away from the 20th century standardized testing system that’s holding back our 21st century students and teachers. This testing has been the unstable foundation of our education system. Moving toward a new model will take vision.
And courage.