But even if it can’t or won’t, all of us here at the Center for Assessment — and many others — think states should anyway.

Statewide exams are designed to serve four critically important purposes: monitoring of statewide educational growth and achievement; evaluation and continuous improvement; transparency and public engagement, and the signaling of expectations for student learning.

State education leaders and policymakers must monitor students’ educational opportunities and outcomes so they can provide the kinds of resources schools need, such as reading intervention for students or specialized training for teachers or principals. High-quality statewide standards-based achievement tests are well-suited to this work because they are designed and administered to yield comparable scores across students, schools and districts.  

State and local leaders also need data to help schools improve and to evaluate programs and initiatives. State tests are not designed to improve instruction in real time — that’s a job best handled by classroom assessments. But the state exams play a powerful role in clarifying the bigger picture. For instance, across a district or state, which curriculum and instructional programs are working?

To answer that question, state and district leaders conduct or commission a study, using a range of information that sheds light on student learning. Assessment results are a crucial piece of that picture. Understanding patterns in student performance in fourth grade reading, for instance, helps leaders figure out how to better support reading instruction in fourth grade. 

State test results help the public understand how well K-12 education is working. Public education is a foundation of democracy and one of the largest budget items for state and local governments. The public has a right to understand how these funds are used and whether school districts provide their students with meaningful learning opportunities. 

Comparable statewide test scores are an essential source of information to support efforts to build public trust and increase this type of transparency. Many other indicators of schooling, such as readiness for college or work, should also be publicly reported, but student academic outcomes should be featured. 

High-quality statewide tests that embody state content standards also serve an important signaling function: They help teachers, students, principals and district leaders understand intended learning goals by providing explicit depictions of the content standards. ±őłÙ’s one thing to show someone a third-grade math standard; it’s another to show someone the test question that reflects that standard. That’s when the intended learning goals really come into focus. 

State exams are in a uniquely powerful position to do all this work. They are subjected to higher-quality standards than any other test. They are thoroughly evaluated by local educators, state technical advisory committee members — independent national measurement experts — and fellow teachers through the U.S. Department of Education’s peer-review process. 

State tests must document that they meet agreed-upon key criteria, including validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and comparability. These criteria are elaborated in the bible for testing professionals, , and the . These documents provide a shared understanding of quality and guide the work of state testing professionals and their assessment company partners.

District leaders and others have pressured states to replace their annual exams with their favorite interim or benchmark test. The rationale is simple and somewhat compelling: “We already use Assessment X three times each year, and we like the results. Why do we also need a separate state exam?”

The answer is straightforward. The level of independent review and evaluation state exams receive, and the resulting transparency, far exceeds that of any other K-12 assessment. Commercial exams are not designed to support the purposes I’ve described, and none have met the technical requirements that state assessments must meet. 

Educators want state assessments to serve critical purposes, and these exams have met rigorous quality standards to do so. They are crucial tools for monitoring the achievement and growth of all students in the state, evaluating programs, providing a way to report transparently about schooling in the state, and signaling to teachers and leaders important information about the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn. States must not give up on them even if the federal government takes its foot off the pedal. 

That may seem like a fair question, but millions of kids are sitting down for reading tests this spring with no idea what they will cover. 

This approach to reading tests makes the U.S. an international outlier. According to , a professor at Johns Hopkins University, most countries test kids on a core body of knowledge that’s widely communicated in advance. American-style tests do the opposite. Their content is a surprise to everyone, so no one can get a leg up and prepare unfairly. But this effectively treats reading comprehension as a separate, isolated skill apart from background knowledge, and researchers like Hugh Catts have pointed out that this isn’t aligned with the research on

Comprehension is a function of the ability to decode the letters on the page, combine them into words and then understand what those words mean. 

But whether people can understand what they’re reading is also tied up with their knowledge about that topic. Writers like and have helped popularize what’s informally known as , in which researchers divided junior high students into four groups based on their reading ability and knowledge about baseball. The students were then evaluated on their comprehension of a new passage about a baseball game.

As expected, those who were strong readers and had some familiarity with baseball did the best. But critically, kids who weren’t particularly strong readers but knew about the sport were able to understand the unfamiliar passage better than the supposedly strong readers who didn’t have much prior knowledge. For these students, background information was more powerful than incoming reading ability.

Unfortunately, the American approach to literacy tests attempts to measure reading comprehension alone. This disconnect is a major reason why it’s so much harder to move the needle in reading than it is in math — math test scores move up or down more easily in response to instruction, while reading scores do not.

But worst of all is the effect that the tests have had on reading instruction in schools. As Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools and the author of , pointed out in a recent , English classes are increasingly devoted to reading a series of short, unrelated passages and asking students to find the main idea behind them.

There’s a derogatory term for this type of instruction — teaching to the test. But what if states had tests that were worth teaching to?

A pilot program in Louisiana could present an alternative model for the country. The state has been experimenting with a that is closely aligned to a state-created curriculum called Guidebooks. The test is administered three times during the year, in fall, winter and spring.

Other states and districts may use such a staggered sequence, but Louisiana is unique in that it is specific about what books will be covered on each test for each grade level. For example, seventh graders should be expected to be asked about , by Lois Lowry, in the fall, and other clearly identified books are chosen for different grades and exams.

The test itself is also unique. It contains three sections, asking students to read an unfamiliar passage that connects in some way to a book they’ve covered in class; answer questions about it; and then compare and contrast it with the familiar text.

The point is not to drill students on the plot details of a given book — it’s to immerse them fully in a piece of high-quality literature and then ask them to explain what they learned. That helps students benefit from what psychologists call the , in which the act of taking an exam helps deepen the learning process. In this way, the Louisiana pilot functions more like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs than like the typical state assessment, which asks students to find the main idea of a text they’ve never seen before.

Teachers also seem to appreciate Louisiana’s approach. , one reported, “We love these assessments, they are FAIR to our kids and our teachers and we are excited about the future of [English Language Arts] instruction with these in place.” 

The test has also shifted classroom instructional practices. One teacher told , the former state chief of Louisiana behind the pilot program, “We used to devote time to test prep, and we would just do practice [state] tests. We don’t do that anymore. We devote our time to diving into the unit and making sure that students have a strong understanding, as much background knowledge as we can possibly give them.”

±őłÙ’s whether Louisiana will be able to expand the test beyond its current pilot period, but it still presents lessons for state and federal policymakers.

First, state leaders should take a hard look at their literacy tests; those that serve more as general IQ tests than as true measures of student learning may inadvertently encourage teachers to focus on low-level comprehension skills. Critics of all political stripes might worry about a state endorsing a particular curriculum or point of view, but without taking a stand, states are left with content-free tests like they have now.

Second, even places like Louisiana, that understand the instructional benefits of a high-quality curriculum, still face transition issues. The feds granted Louisiana flexibility to test out its new model as a pilot, but it came with no additional funding and the state had to apply separately for a competitive to build the test. Moreover, the state was required to simultaneously operate both its old test and the new one.

Worse, the feds mandated that the new model produce results that could be compared to the old one’s. A group of civil rights organizations led by Education Trust pushed back and the rules allow for “an alternative method for demonstrating comparability that … will provide for an equally rigorous and statistically valid comparison.” The Biden administration has signaled its willingness to help states be more innovative with their tests, but tethering too closely to an old system is a great way to stifle innovation.

These challenges are large but not insurmountable. In the midst of a national push to reshape how reading is taught, state leaders should take a closer look at how their tests can nudge schools to invest more effort into building students’ background knowledge and for children to spend more time immersed in reading and discussing reading whole books.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman is an occasional consultant for NWEA, which is one of the organizations behind the Louisiana testing pilot.

The online tool, its creators say, will democratize school performance data at an important time, as schools nationwide struggle to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scheduled to go live today, the new website sports a simple interface that allows users to query it conversationally, as they would a search engine or AI chatbot, to plumb math and English language arts data in grades 3-8. At the moment, there are no firm plans to add high school-level data.

If, for instance, a superintendent is curious about math scores for kids learning English in her state, she can : “Show me math scores over time for English learners and non-English learners in Minnesota.” Want to know the 10 school districts in Mississippi with the highest ELA scores in 2023? .

Similarly, parents moving to a new town or neighborhood can ask about data for individual schools in most cases.

The project, dubbed , is a partnership between Brown University and , the company that built the site’s AI functionality. 

The tool takes a cue from data dashboards, such as the federal government’s , which collect statewide assessment information. This one goes further, allowing more up-to-date analyses of state, district and even school-level data, with protections that shield individual students’ scores in small districts and schools. 

Within state, local and school-level data, users can also break down results by race, ethnicity, economic level and other indicators.

The AI aspect allows users to query the database in plain language, said Emily Oster, a well-known economist who often writes on parenting. Oster led the tool’s development and said its potential customer base is broad, from parents and school board members to state policymakers and journalists.

“You can imagine people actually wanting to see in a more granular way, or be able to explore in a more granular way: ‘How are different schools in this district doing’ or ‘How is my district doing relative to another district?’ This will make that much easier.”

Oster said the tool is so easy to use that a school board member sitting in a board meeting could pull out her phone and in a few seconds produce a chart showing school-by-school test results districtwide. 

Policymakers could also benefit from the tool, she said, since they can’t always access state assessment data without cumbersome requests to state education officials. “And that takes time. If you want to have access to get an insight quickly, this is going to make it easier.”

What’s perhaps most useful, Oster said, is the ability to look inside individual states, down to the district or school level, to figure out which schools and populations are doing better than others. “I think that’s actually pretty powerful in terms of where the policy is made.”

Reliance on ‘plain language’

Project Manager Clare Halloran said Zelma grew out of Brown researchers’ own frustration in trying to compare COVID recovery data across states. “It was usually hard to find out where the information was, what was missing,” she said.

Even states with public-facing data portals and dashboards don’t make the job easy, she said, as many are “a little bit clunky.” They rely on dropdown menus that can only offer one indicator at a time. With Zelma, she said, “You can really just kind of say in plain language what you’re looking for,” even if it involves several variables. 

“I think it will make a lot of data just a lot more accessible to a lot more people,” she said. “When the states release their data, we get the headline. But it’s hard for the average person to explore it a little bit more.”

All queries are public but the authors aren’t identified. The site resembles a Twitter-like feed, with the most recent queries at the top so users can see what others want to learn about.

It also offers warnings — dubbed “notable events” — that caution users not to read too much into proficiency levels in certain cases, such as in states and districts where new assessments are being administered, or where they see lower participation rates.

And while it can offer rudimentary comparisons between states, Oster said neither Zelma nor the assessments themselves are built for such comparisons. 

“There are things across states you might get out of this, for example how much recovery has there been” in one state vs. another, she said. “You can sort of squint a little and think about differences in trends. And I actually think there is some stuff we can learn from those kinds of trends. But in terms of levels, these data are just not well suited to a question of, ‘Is Mississippi outperforming Michigan?’ That’s why we’ve got the NAEP data.”

Actually, asking the tool to compare states will prompt a warning saying that states administer different assessments and that proficiency rates “are not comparable across states.” 

Even with a more user-friendly interface, though, the site is only as good as the data underlying it — and it’s uneven among states. Minnesota, for instance, offers test scores clear back to the late 1990s. But Rhode Island has no data before 2018.

And, of course, virtually no states returned test scores in 2020 and 2021, when the U.S. Department of Education granted blanket standardized testing waivers amid the pandemic.

Paul Peterson, who directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said he welcomed the ability to more easily dig into states’ updated testing data.

“Any enhancement of transparency is a good thing,” he said.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to Zelma and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.