What Should Happen to Standardized Testing?

The 2019–2020 school year was anything but standard. The COVID-19 pandemic stopped in-person instruction in its tracks in March 2020, and nothing has been normal since. Now, in many districts across the country, students are more than halfway through a school year where they’ve never even met their teachers in person.

So why, during such a bizarre time, would schools subject students to standardized testing?

As the vice president of education at Sylvan Learning , a supplemental and enrichment education franchise with 750 points of presence across North America and more than 40 years in the business, I’ve thought long and hard about what should happen to standardized testing. As a dedicated mother who has watched my two elementary school-aged children struggle with distance learning, I shudder to think of them being judged by a standardized test as though everything were normal.

But, to truly understand standardized testing, we have to start long before COVID-19.

Standardized testing has been a hot-button issue in the education community for years. As the person in charge of Sylvan’s education offerings, I have hands-on experience preparing kids and families for all kinds of testing, from college prep courses on the SATs and ACTs to teaching elementary schoolers how to tackle the Smarter Balanced test, the PARCC test or the STAR test from Renaissance Learning.

When it comes to measuring how young children learn, standardized tests have a huge impact on the education system as a whole. Schools and teachers get ranked by their performance on these annual tests. Teachers may not get a raise, and school funding could be at risk if they fail to perform. This encourages teachers and schools to focus on nailing the tests, but often leaves parents concerned about their children’s learning progress, as the teachers tend to spend time preparing for tests that don’t affect students’ grades.

So do we subject children to another round of standardized testing that could produce incredibly damning results for schools and teachers who did their best to muddle through a pandemic and the transition to online learning? Or do we let the children slide, and collect no data on the single greatest school disruption event in the modern era?

But instead of testing the kids and holding their schools and teachers accountable for what we predict will be a substantial backslide in learning, which would be the most stringent and worst option, we must skip the accountability part of the testing process.

What I’m talking about is amnesty for schools that show poor results in standardized testing. The alternatives, not testing or testing and punishing schools, just don’t seem fair.

At Sylvan, we’ve helped millions of students catch up after they’ve fallen behind in school. We know that children are amazing and resilient and that they love to learn. What we do at Sylvan hasn’t changed much at all despite the pandemic. We’re still in the business of meeting children at their level and coming up with education solutions to get them to where they’re going and realize their full potential.

To do this, we first need an honest assessment of their current situation and learning needs. On a national level, standardized testing would do this for our country’s youth.

The COVID-19 crisis has shined a light on the difficulties of education in the U.S., but the state of education in this country was dire before the pandemic. It’s worse now, but it’s only deepened existing inequalities in the USA's education system. For kids with two parents, a good socio-economic background and access to lots of devices for online learning, these last semesters might not have been so tough.

But kids who are English language learners, kids with special needs, kids with low socio-economic means and many kids of color were very far behind before COVID-19. The “COVID slide” only adds to longstanding educational inequities and challenges for these students. Standardized testing can tell us how much we’ve lost, and give some guidance about where and how to start regaining ground.

As educators, we should leverage this increased awareness of education disparities generated by COVID-19 to keep pushing for more improvement in how our country is educating kids. We have to do this with a sense of urgency. Things are getting worse for our children, not better.

We have seen state and local education systems rally and change for the better when education has been disrupted in the past. In the last two decades, natural disasters and subsequent displacement of thousands of students have given school systems the rare chance to envision something new, and the window of opportunity to make it happen. Our children need our help. Necessity is the mother of invention, and she is knocking on our door. We should throw the door wide open and let her in.