Standardized tests aren’t going away anytime soon, notes PDK’s CEO. Love them or hate them, school system leaders may as well put them to good use.
Spring is almost here, which means that every public school in America is getting ready for (or already neck deep in) state testing. For two decades now, the nation’s 3rd through 8th graders (and some high schoolers as well) have had to take standardized tests this time of year, in both the English language arts (ELA) and mathematics (and some have had to take tests in social studies and/or science, too).
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) — passed by Congress in late 2015 — was explicitly intended, at least in part, to reduce some of the burdens of test-based accountability. More than four years into the new law, though, most educators, parents, and policy makers continue to rely on such tests as their primary measure of student achievement. All over the country, schools continue to hold pep rallies to prepare for testing season. Teachers continue to set aside their regular instruction in favor of practice tests. And students continue to have nightmares about filling in bubble sheets.
Personally, I wish we lived in a world without standardized tests, and I’m thankful for advocates who’ve worked so hard to expose the negative consequences of over-testing in our schools. But I’m also a pragmatist, and it’s clear to me that those tests aren’t going away anytime soon. So, the question is, what can school system leaders do to make the most of them? To what extent can we leverage test results to help move our schools toward better practices?
Five sets of stakeholders
As long as our states require standardized tests, district leaders will have a responsibility to learn what they can from them and to treat them as an opportunity to engage local stakeholders — especially community members, parents, educators, students, and colleagues at the central office — in important conversations about school improvement.
Community members
Test results can give business leaders, social sector partners, elected officials, and other community members a useful, if rough, sense of the progress their local schools are making. But those people have to know how to interpret those results correctly. For instance, does a 3% gain in 8th-grade math scores reflect a significant rise in achievement, or does it simply reflect the kind of short-term boost in scores that often occurs when a new test is introduced? If districtwide 4th-grade reading scores have risen steadily over a decade, does that mean instruction has become more effective, or were those gains to be expected, given the numbers of higher-income families moving into the area?
School superintendents will always be tempted to put the best possible spin on test results and take credit for gains that have little to do with their policies and programs. However, their real responsibility is to help community members get a more accurate sense of what the results do and do not mean, as well as to present the public with other data (e.g., changes in faculty retention, student disciplinary referrals, and truancy rates) that can provide a better gauge of progress and more useful insights into the kinds of resources and improvement strategies likely to be needed.
Parents
When local media report the latest test results, parents often treat the scores as evidence that their own children are — or are not — in good hands. Is our school a good one, they wonder, or should we find a better option? Is it getting better, or is it getting worse? Do the test results suggest that recent investments are making a positive difference, or do they suggest that it’s time to change course? Perhaps most important, though, parents want to know that the school is being honest with them and is responsive to their concerns. They want to know not just what the test results mean, but whether they can trust school and district leaders to act upon that information. Here, the challenge for system leaders and school administrators is to put the test scores in context, helping parents gauge the school’s progress in meeting the needs of its students in general and of their own child in particular.
Educators
For their part, educators have to worry about standardized tests all year, not just when the results come out in the local paper. They have to analyze the results of last year’s tests, deal with any fallout, review their own performance, prepare for the coming tests, and administer them, all while trying to teach the broader curriculum and meet their students’ full range of needs.
To manage the load (and preserve their sanity), teachers and staff depend on their system leaders to be exceptionally clear about how the test results will be used: Will they inform decisions about resource allocation? Will great scores lead to more autonomy? Will disappointing scores cost people their jobs? What will be communicated to parents and the community, and when? In short, local educators need (and have the right) to know how district leadership will use the scores. Transparency is essential. The superintendent’s job is to keep everyone informed and manage their expectations, and if they don’t do those things well, their credibility will suffer as a result.
Students
Today’s students are the No Child Left Behind generation. Their whole experience in school has revolved around taking standardized tests and, at the same time, trying to make sense of the mixed messages that follow: On one hand, it’s obvious that their teachers and other adults place enormous importance on the tests; on the other hand, those same adults assure them that mere test scores can’t measure their true worth.
I wish I had a simple answer for how to manage this tension. With my own children, I explain that the test is a broad indicator of how they’re doing relative to other kids and then try to give them specific examples of their strengths and opportunities for growth in other areas. I also believe that kids can handle a lot more information than we sometimes give them credit for and that schools should be up-front with them about how the tests will be used. What does it mean for a child if they don’t score well? Will they get extra help? Be pulled out of class? Not be allowed to take certain courses? These conversations do often happen at the school level, but system leaders have a responsibility to ensure that schools have a strategy for communicating openly and honestly about these issues with their students.
Colleagues at the central office
Within the district’s central office, various program leaders can look to student testing data for useful insights into how individual schools, and the district as a whole, are performing. Again, it’s a mistake to read too much into the narrow slice of information those tests provide, but they can sometimes reveal how specific improvement strategies (such as investments in professional learning or new textbooks) depend on, or have consequences for, others (such as efforts to improve human resources or instructional coaching).
For instance, if scores show that a new reading intervention had no discernable effect on 4th-grade test scores, might that have to do with the quality of the intervention or with delays in providing professional development to the relevant teachers? What if the data show that the two schools where reading scores jumped happen to be the ones that arranged for their teachers to receive coaching in the summer before implementing the new program? Doesn’t that suggest that the real need is to provide better teacher support, and not to scrap the intervention?
Similarly, test scores can help system leaders spot telling patterns in student behavior and performance, especially if scores are integrated with data from an early warning system (focusing on metrics such as attendance, course grades, and disciplinary referrals). If a school saw both a steep decline in 6th-grade math scores and a sharp rise in truancy, for example, it’s probably worth looking into the connection. The data alone won’t be sufficient to make any hard-and-fast conclusions about what the district should or shouldn’t do. But it can help system leaders decide where to dig for answers.
Unfortunately, annual standardized testing doesn’t seem to be going away. But at least system leaders can take advantage of the data tests provide to spur useful conversations and analysis among local stakeholders. As much as superintendents may resent over-testing, they have a responsibility to make the best of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
