Standard testing required by state
Move to cancel Keystone, PSSA exams denied
Federally required standardized testing of students will not be canceled due to COVID-19.
In guidance released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, federal officials make clear that annual assessments — in Pennsylvania the Keystone Exams and Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams — are expected to be given to students despite the ongoing pandemic.
But how, exactly, they are administered might be somewhat different than past years.
The guidance stresses the importance of flexibility in administering the tests, which are typically taken each spring. It suggests that states may allow for:
• An extension of the testing window, possibly moving the exams to summer or fall.
• Allowing the assessments to be given remotely.
• Shortening the length of the tests to make administering the tests easier and to provide more time for in-person learning.
The federal department is also allowing states to request waivers to some federal requirements, including one that says at least 95% of students must participate in the tests.
Department of Education officials said Tuesday they appreciate the flexibility of the federal guidance and feel it strikes the right balance between the need for assessment and instructional time. The officials said the state is planning on extending this year’s testing window.
A draft copy of a letter the department will send to federal officials lists September as a possible extension date.
The letter, signed by acting Secretary of Education Noe Ortega, expresses support for standardized testing, but also concern about administering tests this spring.
“To be clear, Pennsylvania feels a moral imperative to assess students as one means of understanding and documenting learning loss,” it reads. “However, the assessment administration itself should not serve to aggravate or confound the issue.”
The idea to cancel standardized testing this year, as it was last year because of the pandemic, is one that has been pushed by many educators, including those in Berks County.
Last month the superintendents of all 18 local school districts signed a letter that was sent to several federal officials asking that the tests be canceled.
That letter laid out four specific reasons:
• The tests will cost students five to eight days of instruction in a year when they’ve already been deprived of a significant amount of classroom instruction. And five to eight days may be an underestimate, with COVID-19 protocols perhaps forcing districts to devote even more time to the tests.
• Students who have opted for fully virtual instruction will not have the option to take the tests virtually. Parents may not be willing to send their students to school to take the tests, and if they do show up it will increase the difficulty of maintaining social distancing.
• Schools that have administered their own local diagnostic assessments have reported an unparalleled lack of effort from students, which leads to inaccurate results. The tests can also add to additional anxiety and fatigue for students.
• The data from the tests will likely be unreliable and invalid when compared to results from other years.
One of those superintendents, Kutztown School District’s Christian Temchatin, said Tuesday that local district have been monitoring their students themselves and have a much clearer picture of how they’re doing than what a standardized test would show.
“The U.S. Department of Education’s decision to not accept waiver applications for mandated standardized testing for the 20202021 school year is very disappointing,” he said. “Each school district has an obligation to monitor student progress, and responding instructionally to their current levels is essential to learning. Every school is implementing a local system of assessment to meet students’ needs.
“The impact on learning of our current model is assessed and will be addressed by the measures already in place,” he added. “Even for schools such as ours that have had access to in-person learning throughout the year, the additional stress of standardized assessments on the school system and some students is not worth the benefit of testing this year.”
Teachers have also been in support of ditching this year’s exams.
In a statement released Tuesday, officials from the state’s largest teachers union said they didn’t agree with the decision not to cancel the testing.
“We are disappointed that the U.S. Department of Education has decided against offering a waiver to standardized testing requirements this year,” said Rich Askey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “As we wrote in a joint letter to our federal elected officials in January, we believe that if we truly want schools and educators to focus on learning recovery, we shouldn’t be administering standardized tests at all this year. Our students have already lost too much classroom instructional time.”
Askey said he supports the state Department of Education’s indication that the testing window for the current school year will be extended through the end of September, which will give schools extra time to prepare for them.
“For the remainder of the 2020-21 school year, educators and students will be able to spend more time focused on teaching and learning, rather than losing vital classroom days to testing this spring,” Askey said of the extended testing window. “This important flexibility will ultimately require strategies at the local level to complete testing this summer or fall. It is our hope that this approach could offer safer conditions for the administration of assessments.”