Through our work with school districts such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Syracuse, New York, and states including Indiana and Louisiana, and have had a front-row seat to the challenges and opportunities in assessment strategy. We’ve seen what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to design a system that serves students and teachers. Too few districts actually know what they are trying to accomplish with all the tests they administer. 

Districts should consider three issues in addressing assessment overload:

• Test volume: Especially in grades K-8, teachers spend too much time preparing for and administering tests, while students lose precious classroom hours — as many as 100 per year — taking redundant exams instead of engaging in meaningful learning. Excessive testing exhausts students and frustrates teachers without always giving them what they need most: insights they can use to improve learning.
  
• Usefulness of test reports: Most district-mandated assessments are off-the-shelf products that deliver results quickly but not necessarily usefully. Districts, teachers and families rely on these tests in good faith, only to receive data that compare students to one another (think percentiles) rather than to the grade-level standards they need to master.
  
• Incoherence: To boost student outcomes, districts often add tests without retiring others. Leaders of various central office departments — special education, literacy, multilingual learning and the like — procure their own exams, without coordinating to consider “two for one” opportunities. The result is a tangled mess of assessments that overlap, confuse and overwhelm. In some districts, we’ve seen as many as 15 assessments in play, with each serving a different purpose. 

Although the problem is layered, the solution is straightforward: Districts need fewer, more instructionally useful assessments. A strategic approach can transform how schools measure progress, decrease costs and stress, and help students and teachers focus on what matters: learning. 

In our organizations’ work helping states and school systems use more effective assessments, we’ve seen district leaders make great decisions that resulted in more streamlined exams. (Together, we’ve published a to guide other districts through a similar process.) We recommend that every district take these four actions:

Build a unified leadership team. Districts must bridge internal divisions among departments. A strong assessment redesign team should involve curriculum leaders, testing experts and specialists in multilingual and special education (at minimum) to establish the purpose and guiding principles for assessment planning, asking how exams contribute to and and help measure progress toward achieving the district’s broader vision for learning.

Audit and streamline tests. Districts must scrutinize every exam: What is its purpose? Does it deliver insights that educators can use to plan their next moves with students? Which truly help teachers teach, and which are just filling up time? By focusing on fewer but higher-quality assessments, districts can reclaim valuable instructional time and ensure that every test adds value for teachers and students. ANet’s assessment audit across Louisiana revealed that seventh-graders were losing up to 22 instructional days per year due to a bloated assessment system. Post-audit, 15 Louisiana districts reclaimed an average of five days of school per year.

Engage educators in the redesign. Teachers bring a critical perspective to assessment selection and use. Districts should bring educators into the process early and often, seeking their insights on which exams work, which don’t and how testing can be improved. In Syracuse, the district’s leadership team convened a committee of teachers and principals who reviewed the nearly 70 local assessments for K-8. With this educator input, the district eliminated many duplicative assessments and clarified the purpose and use of data from others. 

Communicate the new approach. If educators understand why certain tests were removed and which remain, they’ll get on board, and when teachers are invested, students benefit. We recommend first cultivating the support of a team of influential educators and community leaders. In our work with districts across multiple states, there was a clear trend: Districts that engaged parents and teachers early — explaining the “why” behind changes — saw higher buy-in and smoother implementation​. After a well-communicated assessment redesign process in Madison, 97% of school leaders supported the district’s vision for the role of assessments, up from 44%. 

Exams don’t have to be a burden. By committing to fewer, more purposeful assessments, districts can lighten the load on educators and sharpen their focus on student outcomes systemwide. We’ve seen districts successfully transform their approach to assessment and witnessed the pain points in districts that have not yet done this critical work. 

The solution isn’t more tests, it’s the right tests. That’s how to give teachers the insights they need and students the learning they deserve. 

The history of Indigenous peoples in Wisconsin is deep and abundant, yet it’s a history that has long been glossed over without proper attention or, in many cases, unacknowledged completely.

on Madison’s west side is pushing against that narrative of erasure through a voluntary land tax that goes beyond simply acknowledging that the land under the church once belonged to the Ho-Chunk Nation — whose members were forced from the land.

“We started researching to understand how the land that the church stands on came to be the church’s land,” said the Rev. Miranda Hassett, rector of St. Dunstan’s. “We felt like that needed to be accompanied by some restorative actions. Taking some actions to kind of make amends, and move toward restoring wholeness and being better allies, even in small ways.”

She added, “We’re pretty close to a historic Ho-Chunk village, in a part of the southwestern corner of Lake Mendota. That was part of the territory that was ceded in the 1832 Treaty that dislocated and removed the Ho-Chunk, so our initial thought was to make a gift to the Ho-Chunk tribe.”

Hassett contacted the Rev. Kerri Parker, executive director of the (WCC). St. Dunstan’s is a member of the WCC, and Hassett thought the effort could benefit from collaboration. As an organization with 75 years of history that connects 21 different Christian traditions across the state, the WCC is no stranger to facilitating solutions to modern social issues. 

“We find that we can do a lot of things more effectively together than we could do alone,” Parker said. “Our core values 
 that animate our work are courage, justice and holy imagination.”

Beyond working with social issues such as COVID safety, racial justice and refugee aid, the WCC is also committed to acknowledgement, restorative justice and current issues facing Indigenous communities.

“We have taken the time to start building relationships with leaders and educators,” Parker said. “You can say you want to give money, but you’re not really doing the work unless you have that meaning level between people 
  It’s about understanding why this money is changing hands, and how it all came to be.”

Parker connected Hassett to Bill Quackenbush, the Ho-Chunk’s tribal historic preservation officer. On Quackenbush’s advice, the church decided to pay the voluntary tax to the Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee. 

“That seemed like the appropriate entity,” Hassett said. “I think Bill was thinking, if this church does it, maybe other entities will follow suit. Rather than parse it out tribe by tribe and try to figure out exactly whose territory everybody’s sitting on, it makes sense for this organization that represents all the Wisconsin tribes to have that role here.”

Hassett said the church’s $4,000 payment is a first for the repatriation committee. Parker hopes it won’t be the last.

“I think about this event, this moment of possibility, as an example of instigating holy imagination in people,” she said. “Look at this thing that this church did. I wonder what we could do?”

‘We all have a creator’

Hassett presented the check to Quackenbush at the repatriation committee’s Aug. 16 meeting at the Radisson Hotel on the Oneida Reservation. The committee includes historic preservation officers from tribes in Wisconsin whose work includes repatriation of artifacts to Indigenous nations from individuals and state museums and preserving historic sites, such as effigy mounds.

“We all have a creator,” Quackenbush said. “All of this (land acknowledgements and donations) is symbolic of a healing process, but also a step forward. 
 The tribes can’t do it alone. We need state agencies and other organizations.”

The check was presented in a purple envelope, which Parker said is the color of repentance.

“We acknowledge that our ability to worship on Ho-Chunk land came at a great cost to those people,” Hassett said at the meeting.

Much discussion at the meeting revolved around the Doctrine of Discovery, which was Catholic doctrine that essentially permitted Christian European nations to subjugate and spread forced Christianity on Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa.

“The Doctrine has become the foundation of people’s understanding relative to North America and its original inhabitants,” she said. “The settlers had a sense of understanding that their mission was for God and king. That understanding has become part of our psyche. It’s ingrained in our laws and was part of the idea of Manifest Destiny. It’s not just history, but still happening today.”

‘This is something we owe’

Hassett said the payment is not charity — it’s part of the church’s budget of expenses related to owning the property.

“We have money we give away to organizations that are doing good in the community,” she said. “This is different from that. This isn’t from our charity, or generosity. This is something we owe. That was important to me.”

The voluntary land tax is just one piece of what Hassett sees as a multitude of ways in which work can be done to help mend a history that has seen Indigenous people subjugated and erased from social recognition. 

“We want to be allies in the sense that, we’re going to observe in some way, we’re going to try to mark , and when there’s an issue to protest or a legislative issue that’s important to the tribes, we’re going to pay attention, show up for that, and lend our voices.”

Teach The Truth Wisconsin is part of the Wisconsin Council of Churches’ effort to educate about U.S. history that includes how structural issues such racism, sexism and marginalization of Indigenous peoples have shaped the country and the effect they still have on society today.

“We’re encouraging people to make videos, have community events, or anything that helps people understand how vital it is that we tell these stories and rehearse these histories,” said Parker of the WCC. “In a time when there are movements that say, ‘That’s hurtful, or that makes people feel bad,’ it’s really important that we understand the truth and the difficult histories that are part of our legacy here in the United States.”

Hassett noted that St. Dunstan’s stands near an effigy mound, a reminder of the Ho-Chunk who once lived there — and their resilience. 

“They were removed, but they kept coming back to their ancestral homelands to care for their ancestors’ graves and engage in the historical ecological practices of their people,” Hassett said. “Eventually, they were able to buy land and really reestablish a stake in Wisconsin, which is amazing.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Many of the seniors who she had supported through the spring college admission process at Capital High in Madison, Wisconsin — where about three-quarters of students are Black or Hispanic, and 4 in 5 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — opted to abandon their post-secondary plans for fall. Even students who had won scholarships, she learned, decided not to enroll.

“Survival became the key,” Matt told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, explaining that, instead of college, many students picked up jobs to help their families make ends meet. “They became 
 the breadwinning part of the family.”

When the fall of 2021 rolled around, very few of those students were ready to return to their studies. One was working as a security guard, others were in fast food, another disclosed to the Wisconsin counselor that his mental health had taken a downturn during quarantine and that he couldn’t consider moving away from his family for college. 

The pandemic, Matt said, “threw a wrench” into many students’ higher education plans.

Similar trends have played out for countless students across the country, new data reveal: More than a year after a surge of 2020 high school graduates chose to scrap or postpone their college plans, only a tiny fraction have now re-enrolled to pursue higher education.

Just of students who opted to take time off after completing high school in 2020 matriculated a year later in 2021, meaning the vast majority did not take short-term “gap years,” but rather have put college plans on an extended pause — or nixed them altogether. 

Nearly 1 million 2020 grads in the dataset, which comes from the , did not immediately enroll in college the following fall. Because the Clearinghouse tracks roughly half of the nation’s high school seniors, the true population-wide number may be closer to 2 million.

Those are worrisome statistics for experts who say the further that high school graduates delay post-secondary education, the more difficult their transition back to school becomes.

“In normal times, we know that the longer students stay out of school, the harder it is for them to come back and restart,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the Clearinghouse’s research center.

The nation’s first high school class to graduate amid the pandemic saw a considerable dip in college-going, with only 39 percent immediately enrolling in higher education compared to 43 and 42 percent of the 2018 and 2019 classes, respectively.

Because of the increased pool of students who did not go straight to college, observers had hoped to see a bump in what they call “gap year enrollment,” or the share of students who matriculate a year later. But the 2 percent return rate is slightly lower than previous years.

“There was a great expectation that this was a temporary blip due to the pandemic,” Shapiro told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Yet, here we are a year later 
 and hardly any of those students who stayed out last year have come back.”

There were steeper drop-offs in the share of graduates taking time off rather than enrolling in college in high-poverty schools attended mostly by students of color compared to predominantly white and affluent schools — and the numbers did not self-correct a year later. 

Those disparities are yet another example, said Mauriell Amechi, a policy analyst with New America, of how COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on those who were already most vulnerable.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to exacerbate some long-standing inequities facing historically underserved and marginalized populations in the American education system,” Amechi told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

If decreased shares of students of color are able to access college amid the pandemic, he said, that’s a racial equity issue with consequences that will reverberate for decades.

“Students that delay enrollment are less likely to pursue a college education,” he said. “We can’t allow this issue to go unaddressed because it would only contribute to growing disparities in the American workforce.”

Back in Madison, there’s some optimistic news from Capital High, albeit anecdotal. Recently, Matt has been hearing from 2020 graduates who are now ready to return to their studies. Multiple students have reached out asking for transcripts and letters of recommendation. 

“Any student who had been college bound, I don’t think that they gave up on the dream completely,” she said.

Matt — who was named — distributes her contact information to graduating seniors, knowing that many don’t have parents who are familiar with the college process. She works with about 200 students at a time, comfortably within the 250-student maximum recommended by the American School Counselors Association, meaning she has the bandwidth to provide some extra help, even post-graduation. 

Nationwide, however, high school counselors work with an average of , and only 1 in 5 high schoolers attend a school sufficiently staffed with counselors. In such cases, many graduates seeking to finally enroll in college after multiple years off may have to navigate the path on their own.

Even for Matt’s students, she worries the extended time away from academics could make for a rough re-entry process.

“​​If you’re not practicing math everyday you start losing those skills,” she explained.

Given that, colleges and universities should make plans to help students re-adjust to school and studying, she said.

It’s an idea that Shapiro, at the Clearinghouse, echoes.

“If these students are to come back next year or two years further down the road,” he said, “they’re going to need more attention, more help, to make that transition.”

Across the country, advocates for police-free schools said the moment offers mixed emotions. After years of advocacy and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that gave their movement unprecedented momentum, proponents said the return to in-person learning provides an opportunity to prove that police aren’t necessary to maintain safe schools.

But they’re also on edge about whether districts are fully committed to less punitive school safety strategies, especially as pandemic-induced disruptions and public health rules like mask mandates drag on. After the lengthy shutdown where students faced family illness, economic instability, isolation and learning loss, some experts worry that many could return to schools with

Anxiety is particularly high in Minneapolis, where barricades and razor wire were erected downtown as the murder trial of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, charged in Floyd’s death, got underway. The final juror was selected Tuesday. The appearance of a militarized city and the trial’s outcome could further traumatize students, leading to concern among advocates that negative interactions between police and youth could spill over into schools. The district is already preparing to help guide students through potential turmoil, officials said.

“I’m worried about what the impact of the trial will do to our city right now, and how is that then going to reverberate into our first time in-person [learning] in over a year?” asked Kenneth Eban, an education activist in Minneapolis.

After Floyd’s death prompted the Minneapolis school board to terminate its longstanding contract with the city police department, the district hired a cadre of “public safety support specialists,” many with criminal justice experience, to fill the void. Though the support specialists serve a security function, district leaders have touted them as a major shift from armed, school-based officers with arrest powers.

But critics are concerned that the district is building an internal security force that isn’t substantively different from police.

Among them is Khulia Pringle, the Minnesota delegate of the National Parents Union, who was invited to participate in the support specialists’ interviewing process. Since then, she’s felt “left out in the dark” about how they’ll be used once campuses fully reopen, with high schoolers scheduled to return April 12. As district leaders focus school safety conversations mainly on the pandemic, she said they’ve provided parents with little information about the specialists, which she called an “experiment on the backs of” students of color and those from low-income households.

“I’m scared,” Pringle said. “I just pray to God that it all works out, and I pray to God that no Black child, no brown child and no indigenous child suffers any trauma trying to figure out if this experiment is going to work.”

During remote learning, the Minneapolis safety specialists conducted home visits to re-engage students with attendance issues, trained school staff on how to de-escalate volatile situations with students, and conducted campus security assessments, Jason Matlock, the director of emergency management, safety and security, said in a statement.

Through the home visits, it was clear that they’re able to “be a bridge between safety and relationship building.”

As the highly charged Chauvin trial unfolds, the specialists have been readying to offer help to students who may be in distress.

“Without some of the barriers to engagement that come from wearing a police uniform, they can be present, share authentic experiences with students and listen to the needs of the students,” Matlock said.

Though the Minneapolis district was among the first to break from its police contract, dozens of districts nationwide were quick to follow. Education leaders in more than 40 cities have since removed or dramatically scaled back the presence of police in schools, according to a tally by the Education Civil Rights Alliance at the National Center for Youth Law.

Those locales span from Portland, Oregon, to Madison, Wisconsin. How these districts plan to move forward, however, varies widely across the country, said Miriam Rollin, director of the civil rights alliance. But in order for the various plans to work, she said, it’s critical that districts prioritize strategies that could prevent student outbursts in the first place, such as by hiring additional school counselors.

“Can I be excited and concerned at the same time? I am excited about the potential to do it right, and I am concerned â€” deeply concerned — about the potential to do it wrong,” Rollin said. “Both are equally potential right now.”

Advocates’ jitters, similar to those in Minneapolis, were evident in Los Angeles, where the school board . That vote cut 133 positions from the LA Unified School District police department, removed all officers from being stationed on campuses, banned the use of pepper spray on students and reallocated $25 million to an initiative to improve the educational experiences of Black students. The plan also includes the adoption of “school climate coaches,” described by the district as student advocates focused on fostering positive school cultures.

Kelly Gonez, president of the school board in the nation’s second-largest school district, said that positive relationships between adults and students are critical to school safety. The new safety coaches, she said in a statement, will be “trained in de-escalation techniques, implicit bias and socio-emotional learning strategies to assist students who may need support.”

Under a new “patrol model,” sworn police officers won’t be stationed on campus but will be nearby “if an event requires an immediate response.” Such a strategy will help protect students during an emergency, she said, while recognizing the needs of Black students “for whom the presence of police on campus not only detracted from a feeling of safety, but often constituted actual harm.”

Channing Martinez, the director of organizing at the Labor/Community Strategy Center, said the Los Angeles vote was a major victory for proponents of police-free schools, yet it was also just the first step in their goal to dismantle the district police department entirely. As the plan is implemented — L.A. schools are expected to — Martinez said it’ll be critical to ensure the school climate coaches aren’t police with a different name.

“That’s going to be the struggle,” he said.

When the lunchroom feels like jail

The presence of school-based police has grown exponentially in the last several decades. About 43 percent of public K-12 schools — and 71 percent of high schools — had armed law enforcement officers stationed on campus in the 2015-16 school year, according to the most recent federal data. Proponents say the officers build positive relationships with students who see them as role models.

Even in Los Angeles, campus police enjoy support from the majority of students, parents and staff, according to . In total, 51 percent of students, 64 percent of parents and 59 percent of school staff said they believe school-based officers make campuses safe. Among students, just 17 percent said they do not feel safe when a police officer is present on campus and 27 percent said they feel uncomfortable around school police.

“The police are very nice to us,” one Latino student told researchers in a focus group. “They are not scary, and they talk to us. If you say hi, they say hi back in a friendly manner.”

But Los Angeles students’ perception of campus police varies widely based on their race; just 35 percent of Black students said that officers make schools safe compared with 54 percent of Latinos, 49 percent of whites and 56 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders.

°Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s to suggest that school-based officers actually make campuses safer, and high-profile incidents of police brutality has galvanized a “counselors not cops” protest movement that has called for schools to replace police with mental health supports and other non-punitive prevention measures.

Even with many campuses closed during the pandemic, several negative interactions between police and students have fueled advocates’ fire. In January, a school resource officer in Florida came under scrutiny for . Officials said the officer was trying to break up a fight when the teenage student attacked him. In a separate Florida incident, state law enforcement officials launched an investigation after another officer bodyslammed a female student in a campus breezeway.

In a focus group for the Los Angeles study, one Black student told researchers that the officers are rude to students and often confront them with force.

Officers treated one teen “Like she was nothing,” the student said. “I mean slammed her and the whole nine. So, they are very rough, and they are not very respectful.”

For many Minneapolis students, the presence of police created a culture of fear, said Nathaniel Genene, a high school senior who was the school board’s student representative when it voted to terminate the police contract. This negative climate was particularly evident in the lunchroom, he said, where officers watched as students ate.

“For a lot of students that made them uncomfortable just eating and having someone staring down your back when you’re not doing anything that is of criminal intent,” he said. “You’re just sitting there eating your food.”

When he returns to in-person learning next month, the police won’t be there — a change that he called a “new chapter” for the district. Though the school board’s decision to cut ties with the city police department “was more of a moral question and a principles question,” he expects students to feel just as safe as they did before. School-based police offered students “a false sense of security,” he said. “As far as being able to sit in a lunchroom and not feel like you have a target on your back, I think it’s going to give kids a sigh of relief.”

Minneapolis students who previously felt uneasy by the police presence on campus no longer “have to fear that the slightest mistake they make might have a law enforcement response,” the district said in the statement. “Instead, they see a member of their school community ready to advocate for them and keep their best interests and their safety in mind.”

High school senior Genene was optimistic about the district’s decision to hire the public safety support specialists, noting that they were “never intended to be a one-for-one replacement” of the school resource officers and, unlike campus cops, have an opportunity to become “trusted adults” for students in distress.

But their implementation comes at a time of heightened tension for the city, with the Chauvin trial underway. Local activist Marika Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation and a proponent of the police-free schools movement, said she’s concerned about how the support specialists will confront potential classroom disruptions and youth involvement in protests. She questioned whether the support specialists would partner with city police to identify students involved in protests.

Now, as more school systems join the growing list of districts without police in schools, Pfefferkorn discouraged education leaders from looking to Minneapolis as a success story.

“Minneapolis did a quick and easy solution and they didn’t engage in a larger conversation about what this would look like” after the police were removed from schools, she said. “For folks to be pointing at Minneapolis and saying ‘Look, we’ve got the next solution,’ if you’re in the research world you’d say, ‘This is a theory, but we don’t have any evidence to back it up.’”

While some local activists have challenged the district’s decision to hire the support specialists, other school safety experts have derided Minneapolis’s move to terminate its police contract altogether. Consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, blasted districts’ embrace of police-free schools more broadly as being politically motivated. Their focus on optics rather than on conducting evaluations of school policing programs could come back to bite them, he predicted.

“All hell’s going to break loose,” Trump said, noting that districts could face negligence lawsuits if someone is harmed during a violent incident in school. The result, he said, could be the rise of student discipline policies that are even more punitive than before.

“We swing from one extreme to the other to a point of being radically lenient policy-wise on one hand to radically punitive and draconian on the other, the tough-on-crime stuff,” he said. “The best policy is usually somewhere in the middle, and we’re not in a society where anything is in the middle anymore.”

The movement is about more than police

Though advocates for police-free schools found an unprecedented wave of victories following Floyd’s death, the hard work has just begun. Simply removing officers from schools was never the end goal, said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist at The Advancement Project, a national racial justice group.

“Implementation is so critical, and it’s always the unsexy work,” she said, requiring advocates to negotiate with districts to ensure resources traditionally earmarked for police are reinvested in student services, like counselors and restorative justice.

“We want to make sure that it’s not just about removing the police officers, but that we’re actually talking about transforming” schools and the way they serve Black children, she said. “We have to always be on the lookout for all the insidious ways that we know policing can happen,” including surveillance and internal school security forces that function similar to police.

The same is true in Minneapolis. The struggle was never just about a dozen school-based officers, Eban, the education activist, said. Instead, it’s about a broader culture change away from punitive school policies, he said. But as students return after an extended period away, he urged educators to do everything in their power to avoid calling the police for backup. Every time an officer is called to a situation, he said, is “a failure of the district to not be more intentional” in their school safety protocols.

Educators will “no longer have the crutch” of school-based police “to handle uncomfortable or difficult situations,” the district said in the statement, noting that the safety specialists will “reduce the desire by adults to ask for police assistance” during incidents that can be managed internally.

Advocates in Madison, Wisconsin, have also turned their focus on educators after succeeding in removing officers from classrooms. Bianca Gomez, the youth justice director at the nonprofit Freedom, Inc., said it’s important to “hold teachers accountable for using police to harm young people.” The next step in police-free schools is ensuring that educators don’t simply call 911 on students, she said. To make that a reality, her group will ask educators to sign a pledge committing to not calling on police for backup.

“We don’t want any police having interactions with our young people,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a school cop, it doesn’t matter if it’s a community officer, it doesn’t matter if you’re just calling 911 and Officer Random shows up.”