A misguided push for tests

Sure, the U.S. Department of Education can force New York's public schools to give kids standardized assessment tests this year. Administrators can squeeze some data out of them and feel like they’re doing something, being accountable, seeing “how far kids have come” or “how far they’ve fallen.”

But they shouldn’t. Not at all. Testing will not produce meaningful data because it's likely to miss the children who have been hurt most by school shutdowns. And it's a mistake to demand districts devote resources to testing when so many schools are struggling to provide kids with even the basics under the cruel weight of the pandemic.

However well-intentioned this testing push may be, it is a waste of time and money that could be far better spent.

New York state educators had asked the feds to waive the testing requirements for grades 3-8, as they did last spring, given the realities of the 20202021 school year. The request was denied. Schools must conduct the tests, either in-person or remotely, said acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum, because “to be successful once schools have reopened, we need to understand the impact COVID -19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need.”

Mr. Rosenblum is getting ahead of himself. We have students who haven't seen the inside of a classroom in a year. This mandate is out of step with the reality of education, especially at New York's hardest hit schools. Setting aside the broader arguments against standardized assessments in any year — the way they skew classroom teaching, the outsized resources they consume, the questionable value of the data they produce — this year presents its own arguments against testing.

To begin with, this year looks nothing like years past. Districts right now

are a mix of remote and in-person learning, and it's an uneven mix: Bracing for funding cuts, a number of urban school districts opted to keep upper grades remote. In Albany, for example, grades seven through 12 have not met in their classrooms since March. Those taking standardized tests from home would be in a testing environment utterly unlike that of previous assessments. Who knows what distractions or stressors they might be working through — a baby brother crying, a parent on a work call, upstairs neighbors blaring music, or fighting?

What's more, tests conducted in these circumstances are likely to miss the kids who have been hurt the most: the ones without laptops or reliable internet, the ones who attend only sporadically because they don't have the structure and supervision to make working from home viable. The nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners estimates that upward of 3 million students nationwide may have gone without any schooling at all since shutdowns began last spring. How much could tests really tell us about learning loss when the kids who have potentially lost the most are the ones most likely to miss the assessment?

How these tests can be conducted securely with students taking them at home, on what’s likely to be a computer connected to the internet, is at the very least questionable. There’s a reason teachers or other monitors have long served as proctors at tests for every grade level and into graduate school. The alternative — insisting all students come into school for testing — would hardly be prudent at a time when schools aren’t even opening for regular class.

It's also worth noting that many parents likely will opt their kids out of the exams, further skewing whatever results the tests produce.

We won’t be testing the same pool of kids, and we won’t be testing them in the same environment. Therefore, any data collected won’t be comparable to the data of previous testing years, because — to repeat — this year is unlike any previous testing year.

The assessments won't just be useless; they'll come at a price. With all that has been lost this year, how can the government expect schools to devote time and resources to standardized tests? And make no mistake: Kids are feeling the stress of this strange and difficult year. Even under normal circumstances, many students find these assessments highly stressful. There is no good reason to pile extra pressure on already-stressed kids, especially in the name of collecting data that won’t end up being meaningful.

The Department of Education has left schools the option of putting off the exams, even into the fall. And that's the loophole New York should aim for: delays in administering the tests for as long as legally possible, in the hope that either all students will be back in classrooms by then or the federal government will have come to its senses and revised this misguided mandate. Waiting until all children are fully back in school is the only way to conduct tests that could yield meaningful data.

Though the testing mandate is a poor choice, the reasons behind it are solid: Far too many students have indeed fallen behind because of COVID'S disruptions, and for some of them the repercussions could last a lifetime. This is a crisis not just for education but for our entire society. We will undoubtedly spend years trying to remediate the educational damage of this pandemic. That work will require assessing that damage in an honest and thorough fashion.

But right now, when we’re still in the thick of it, is not the time to take stock of the damage the pandemic has wrought, and will continue to wreak.