Obama administration's Testing Action Plan not sufficient corrective to excessive testing

On Oct. 24, the White House released its Testing Action Plan, a document that discusses "Principles for Fewer and Smarter Assessments." As national discourse about the amount of time and funding spent on standardized testing in K-12 education gains more and more of the media spotlight, this plan could have been a solid opportunity for proposing real reform. However, it focuses largely on solving political problems rather than actual classroom issues, perpetuating the Department of Education’s current agenda with more palatable phrasing. The Obama administration’s “Race To the Top” initiative encouraged states to adopt common standards (which inevitably come with more standardized tests) and tied teachers’ performance evaluations to the test scores of their students.

These two initiatives have been central tenets of the administration’s previous education policy, and the Testing Action Plan only bolsters this problematic trajectory.

The crux of the Testing Action Plan is a proposal to reduce the amount of time students spend on standardized testing to two percent or less of class time. While the cap sounds dramatic, it won’t actually result in much change. Some states already are under the two percent testing cap. A Center for American Progress analysis of 14 districts in seven statesfound that testing consumed an average of only 1.6 percent of instructional time.

In states spending more than an average of two percent of class time on testing, the cap will not necessarily bring about a positive change. If these standards are adopted, there will inevitably be conflict over which tests get to compete for this limited space, and as an Oct. 30 Washington Post op-ed notes, “Tests backed by powerful interest groups would remain untouchable, while tests that provide teachers with the data they need would be cut.” While standardized testing in this country is excessive in comparison to other educational systems, a blanket cap of two percent testing time is only intended to make headlines and not to create legitimate systemic change.

The Testing Action Plan also asserts that “no standardized test should be given solely for educator evaluation.” Upon first glance, this seems to be a step forward that would provide teachers with greater flexibility in the classroom. However, even with this change, it would still be acceptable for states like New York to use the Common Core exam (which 20 percent of students this past spring opted out of taking) to count for 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations and to determine the quality of the school as a whole. Meanwhile, experts such as the American Statistical Association find that standardized tests are an invalid evaluation tool for teacher performance.

The administration should go further in limiting the influence of such tests on evaluating performance, especially when expert consensus shows that the current policies are ineffective. Overall, the Testing Action Plan does little to reform the state of education in the United States. In order to solve the complex and multifaceted issues posed by standardized testing, we must focus more on the tests and standards themselves rather than imposing arbitrary rules designed to make headlines.