Give districts an inch in education reform, they’ll take a kilometer

How many miles are in a 5K? Despite the United States’s rejection of the metric system, most Americans could answer that question — or at least use Google to find out — because standard conversion rates between the two units exist. But what would happen if every country decided to use its own measurement system with varying values, making it impossible to compare a mile to a kilometer, or a liter to a gallon? Chaos would ensue, as we would have no way of knowing how to objectively compare measurements in one country to measurements in another.

Republicans in Congress are attempting to greenlight such a haphazard system for statewide assessment systems in their reauthorization proposals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Rather than maintaining the requirement that states develop and administer one standardized test for all students, Republicans instead want to give districts the ability to opt out of such assessments in favor of locally developed tests. And they want to allow districts to do so without proving to the Department of Education that the data collected from those assessments will be comparable (a requirement under current law), potentially rendering annual testing useless for measuring student performance across districts or states.

{mosads}As former classroom teachers, we are all too aware of why this proposal should be rejected. First, it would create a complicated patchwork of assessments and make it impossible to compare one district assessment with another. What Republicans are proposing — flexibility without proof of comparability — would leave the practice of testing in place while rendering the data useless in any district that chooses to opt out — a result that would completely undermine the original purpose of NCLB’s standardized testing requirements.

Second, it would hurt students in both rural and urban districts. If rural school districts opted out of state tests, the local substitute test would be meaningless because there would be too few students within the district to conduct any sort of analysis, since most rural districts only serve one or two schools per grade level. This issue would be compounded when looking at high-needs groups of students who have benefitted so much from NCLB — like those enrolled in special education — since there would be even fewer students to compare. This would result in districts analyzing their data in a vacuum, leaving them with no true sense of where their students stand among the larger student population.

In urban districts, opting out would mean having no idea how well low-income and minority populations are faring compared to their wealthier suburban peers. The education gap that concerns us all will “disappear” because urban and suburban schools will be taking different tests. We’ll only know about gaps within districts not between districts. 

Current law allows for some flexibility for districts to opt out of the statewide tests and innovate by piloting their own assessments— but only if they can they can prove that those tests will yield truly comparable data to the ones employed at the statewide level. Any reauthorization to NCLB must at minimum continue to include such important guardrails in order to maintain the integrity of the student data produced by the testing process and ensure we do not throw out the gains made under No Child Left Behind.

Just as runners want to know how far they’ll have to go to reach the finish line in a 5K (3.1 miles to be precise), parents and teachers need to know how far their children are progressing toward grade-level proficiency targets, graduation, and college and career readiness. But allowing districts to create their own tests with zero guarantee of comparability to the state-based test or the tests of neighboring districts is the equivalent of setting out on a race without knowing the distance or trajectory. Flexibility without comparability is a shortsighted policy that would render invaluable data completely useless and risk relegating millions of children to the sidelines once again.    

Johnson is the social policy and politics fellow and Hiler is the education policy adviser at Third Way, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C.