Originally published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute with co-author Peg Tyre.
The emergence in recent months of common state standards in reading and math—and the U.S. Department of Education’s plans to fund new testing systems aligned with those standards—are likely to spell major changes for the testing industry. These changes are aimed at creating assessment systems that are a lot better for students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole than those created under (or swept up into) the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But coming up with new assessment systems that help to propel more schools toward higher achievement requires two things: policymakers must give educators the incentives they’ve lacked under NCLB to measure advanced skills. And states must be willing to pay for higher quality tests once the federal funding ends.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have sponsored the development of common K-12 education standards in math and English/language arts—a project known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI)—in an effort to improve college readiness for the nation’s students and replace the patchwork of often-superficial state standards that have contributed to troubling gaps in educational opportunities for students living in different parts of the country.
Working closely with the Obama administration and many school reformers, the same organizations have called on states to band together to build new assessment systems that reflect the higher aspirations of the common standards. The Department of Education announced in April 2010 that in September 2010 it plans to award as much as $320 million to groups of states to produce “comprehensive assessment systems” based on the new standards over the next four years, and up to another $30 million for high school end-of-course tests.
Testing-company executives say that the rise of state testing consortia would likely cause more disruption in an industry that has already struggled under NCLB. There would be far fewer tests to create under the consortia, especially if states relinquish the option under the Department of Education’s proposal to permit states to customize up to 15 percent of the questions on the new tests (NGA and CCSSO are also permitting states to customize up to 15 percent of their standards under their CCSSI project). With test development making up some 20 percent of the $800 million to $1 billion state accountability testing market today, the result of fewer tests under the consortium model would be another financial blow to the testing industry.
But they also say the federal initiative could present new opportunities. For example, the industry could concentrate its resources on building smaller numbers of more sophisticated tests that move beyond the low-level skills that states have stressed under NCLB. The industry could focus on creating tests with more measures of advanced skills such as analyzing and synthesizing information—skills that today’s advocates of common standards are demanding.
Towards that end, the Education Department, key congressional voices, and a host of testing experts, education reform groups, and private foundations are pushing the industry to produce more “open-ended” questions such as writing prompts that require students to craft their own responses rather than merely select from among multiple-choice answers (questions that in many instances reward guessing). These kinds of test questions are important to achieving higher academic standards and sounder classroom practice, they say, because “what gets tested is what gets taught.”
The bubble sheet and #2 pencil may, in time, become antiques. Those pressing for innovation want the testing industry to expand technology-based testing that gives teachers real-time results. And they want teachers to play a role in scoring performance test items—as they do in the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs—in the hopes of increasing teachers’ knowledge of and investment in high-quality student work. This demand for a new generation of assessments represents “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for innovation, says Doug Kubach, president and CEO of Pearson Assessment and Information, the largest company in the testing industry and one that may get larger still under the federally funded consortia. (Why? Unless the consortia hire their own test makers, and that’s unlikely experts say, at least a few testing companies will wind up with big contracts.)
But the innovations that the feds and the reformers want are complicated, expensive, and, in some instances, seemingly at odds with one another. And it’s unclear whether cash-strapped states will be willing to invest over the long haul in the kinds of higher quality testing that will help give traction to higher standards. They certainly haven’t been willing to spend on testing under NCLB; instead, they’ve commissioned primarily multiple-choice measures of basic skills in no small part because these are the cheapest tests on the market.
And states will only be willing to set their standards high—and make their assessments rigorous and “cut scores” demanding—so long as Congress changes the model for judging schools. NCLB requires that states take action against public schools in which even a single category of students fails to achieve state standards as measured on a single test—the so-called snapshot model. That part of the law makes many states overly cautious about what they are willing to require students to learn—and be tested on. Currently the Obama administration is calling for changes in NCLB to require schools to administer baseline tests for all students and then test them again to show that they are moving toward mastery of rigorous standards (the so-called growth model). Sanctions—under the Obama plan—would be targeted at schools that have made the least progress with struggling students. Congress’s response to that recommendation will go a long way toward determining the rigor of the next generation of state tests, with huge implications for the future of the testing industry.