Some Pa. school district leaders frustrated with return of standardized tests during pandemic

Gennaro Piraino Jr. said his distaste for state standardized tests has only grown in the past year, despite their absence.

“Given the pandemic, what we know our students need to know and be able to do has become even more evident,” said Piraino, superintendent of Franklin Regional School District. “And we’re still coming back to an antiquated testing system that really doesn’t measure what our students need.”

The Biden administration this week decided against another blanket waiver to the federal requirement for states to administer standardized tests to monitor student achievement. The tests typically are administered in the late spring in a test-proctored classroom; now states can expand their testing windows, shorten the exams, give them virtually or skip testing remote students altogether.

Pennsylvania officials have discussed plans to delay the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment and other exams until September, when it’s assumed more students are likely to be back in schools. But many local district officials say, even with the delay, there’s little benefit to bringing the PSSAs back this year.

“We appreciate the flexibility from USDE and think it strikes the right balance,” said Kendall Alexander, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE). “We cannot cancel federally required tests, but we propose to extend testing windows until the fall and will explore additional flexibilities, as appropriate and available. Again, we’re not waiving tests (Keystones, PSSA, PASA or Access); we’re allowing (districts) to extend testing to ensure conditions are safe and student participation is representative.”

The purpose of state exams, according to the state Department of Education, is to assess the progress of each school district — identifying weaknesses or unmet needs. They are useful tools to politicians in determining where to allocate funding or resources.

Need for data debated

Still, the cancellation of PSSA and Keystone exams last year was seen mostly as inconsequential to education experts, who said the loss of a single year’s data wouldn’t make a difference to the long-term analysis it’s typically used for.

Many educators saw the cancellation as a blessing: With the transition to fully remote learning still fresh, there were other things to worry about. Some saw it as an opportunity to point out the flaws in standardized testing in general.

Piraino, of Franklin Regional, believes the data collected from PSSA isn’t timely enough and it doesn’t properly measure what he thinks is actually necessary for student success. He sees them as an expensive waste of time, especially in the context of the pandemic.

Piraino said moving the exams to September will cause more harm than good. Districts will have to take up to eight days in the fall for the exams, plus up to eight days in the spring for next year’s tests, he said. That’s almost 20 days of school diverted away from learning, at a time when students are struggling with months of instructional loss. He also said moving the PSSAs after the summer could worsen results, given that students will be just returning from a break.

“It didn’t really solve any issue in terms of maximizing the opportunity for student learning,” he said.

Some educators worry that revisiting standardized tests now will take up time and resources at a time when students and teachers are overloaded with the stresses of remote or hybrid learning.

“Our focus first is to get kids back into the buildings and help them learn,” said Minika Jenkins, chief academic officer of Pittsburgh Public Schools, which has been fully remote for most of the last year. “But we do need the data, at some point to determine where students are and what we can do differently to really support them.”

Jenkins sees value in the exams overall, but she is glad they’re going to be pushed to September. With a phased return to in-person learning scheduled for April, she said a standardized test is the last thing students need to worry about.

As the fourth quarter of the school year approaches, public education advocates and families are curious about learning loss that may have occurred during the past year. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education earlier this week, Pennsylvania’s Education Secretary Noe Ortega acknowledged these losses are likely to be greater among English language learners, students of color, special needs students and low-income students who are in complete remote models. But those same students in remote learning situations will be underrepresented in PSSA results if the tests are administered this spring.

“To be clear, Pennsylvania feels a moral imperative to assess students as one means of understanding and documenting learning loss,” Ortega wrote. “However, the assessment administration itself should not serve to aggravate or confound the issue.”

Seeking more effective ways

The logistics of administering the tests raise more questions. Tim Scott, superintendent of Kiski Area School District, wonders if capacity restrictions in classrooms would prompt districts to break up the same exams into multiple days, to keep classrooms from overcrowding. Normally, that would be a test security issue. And without test security, will the results even be valid?

Overall, he said, there is a lot of uncertainty about what benefits standardized testing could have under the current circumstances.

“What is the purpose of testing this year?” Scott said. “What does PDE wish to accomplish?”

Educators agree there are much more effective ways to assess students’ progress over the past year than PSSAs — each district has its own formative examinations for reading, math and other core subjects. Looking at their individual results as they go will be more helpful for making changes, offering intervention or enrichment opportunities, district leaders say.

“If you’re relying solely on state standardized tests to determine how students are doing, you may want to reconsider how you do that,” Jenkins said.

Piraino and other educators at the local level said internal assessments within the school districts are more effective for seeing where students are – especially if PSSAs are going to be delayed more than three months. It would be months later before districts even saw the results.

“We’re continuing nationally with a broken system, when we have an opportunity now to fix that system, to re-create that system,” Piraino said. “When society is more innovative now than any time in history, we still are falling back to archaic and draconian methods for measuring student achievement.”