This Maryland Legislation Could Eliminate 965 Hours of Student Testing
It’s crazy how much unnecessary standardized testing takes place across the state
To put it mildly, Maryland students take on quite a bit of standardized testing during their time in our public schools. According to Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) data for the last school year, the average student takes 249 hours — roughly a quarter of an entire school year — of standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the twelfth grade.
That’s just the average. In many districts, it’s much, much higher.
And that doesn’t include test-prep, teacher-designed tests or quizzes, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams, and in most cases, college readiness tests like the SAT or ACT. That’s just standardized testing mandated by the district, state, or federal government. When you factor in test-prep, data collection, and needed schedule changes, this testing often disrupts regular instruction for weeks at a time throughout the year.
In 14 districts, there’s at least one grade level in which students have more than 30 hours of testing. In some cases, there’s even 50-plus hours of required testing for students. That means the arts, physical education, foreign language, and the other components of a well-rounded education get put on the back-burner.
Maryland schools have so much mandated testing largely because of No Child Left Behind’s high-stakes legacy. The failed federal law required that schools be held accountable based on annual standardized tests in math and English, driving districts to pile on required benchmark, quarterly, pre/post, and even unit tests to ensure students were on track to do well on the big statewide test. Schools got better at boosting test results, but lost sight of what kids really needed to learn to be successful in their education, careers, and communities.
“Standardized testing has had a huge impact on what’s happening in the classroom — anything that isn’t tested is put on the back-burner. We’re completely changing what we’re doing to fit the ability to pass the test and I think we’re losing out.” — Rachel McCusker, 2015–2016 Carroll County Teacher of the Year
In 2011, teachers were surveyed across the country on the narrowing of curriculum. According to most respondents, schools shifted instructional time and resources toward math and language arts, and away from subjects such as art, music, foreign language, and social studies. Two-thirds said that other subjects “get crowded out by extra attention being paid to math or language arts.”
The culprit? Standardized testing. Of the teachers who said the curriculum is narrowing, 93%(!) said it was largely driven by state tests.
“When you think back to school and you were a student, you often think of a teacher who you loved or a particular topic that you learned about that stuck with you for a really long time. And what standardized testing is doing is it’s taking those moments away.” — Jacob Bauer Zebley, 2015–2016 Cecil County Teacher of the Year
People Closest to Schools — Parents and Educators — Want Less Testing and More Learning
The debate over standardized testing boils down to two viewpoints: district officials want more test data to demonstrate school quality, while teachers and parents want individual students to have more time to learn a well-rounded curriculum. In other words, those closest to kids (their parents and educators) believe the tests do little to improve instruction while taking away time from important skills and concepts.
In September 2015, GBA Strategies polled Maryland voters and educators, and found deep frustration about standardized testing:
90% of educators, and 67% of voters, said “there is too much time spent on standardized testing.”
89% of educators, and 71% of voters, said they would support a proposal to “limit the amount of time schools spend administering standardized tests per year.”
Just 26% of voters, and 19% of educators, agreed with the statement: “In order to improve schools, we need to focus on measurable outcomes. Testing is an important tool to measure how well schools are doing, so we can help them improve.”
And when presented with seven problems in K-12 education, both voters and educators most often picked “too much standardized testing” as one of their two biggest concerns.
District Mandates Are Driving Over-Testing
While it’s true that the state standardized test— the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) — and failed school accountability systems have incentivized districts to increase local standardized assessments, school boards and superintendents are the ones with the ability to reduce the most testing.
Last school year, just 65 of the 249 hours of mandated standardized testing taken by the average student over the course of their academic career were state or federal mandated exams. That means 74% of all required testing in Maryland exists because of district mandates. And of the 65 hours not required by districts, almost all of it is required by the federal government, who just renewed that mandate in 2015 when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act. So there’s not much testing reduction that can happen at the state level.
At the same time, district officials have balked at acting on local testing. They blame PARCC for the public opposition to standardized tests and argue that district mandated testing gives teachers valuable data to help improve instruction. But there’s no data to indicate that students in districts with more local testing (and therefore more data) did better on PARCC. If anything, there’s a slight negative effect.
The Less Testing, More Learning Act of 2017
In 2015, President Barack Obama’s Department of Education issued a Testing Action Plan to states, including the recommendation that standardized testing be limited to 2% of all hours in each school year. The 2% number allows time for federally required tests (that at most take up 1% of the school year’s hours) and state and local tests, without permitting districts to go overboard. For instance, even in fifth grade when there are 10.3 hours of federally required exams, a district would still be allowed to require four 45-minute benchmark tests in three subjects (for example, math, English, and science). That’s on top of teacher-designed unit tests or quizzes that don’t count towards the cap.
Based on that recommendation, Delegate Eric Luedtke (D-Montgomery-District 14)—a former teacher and now chair of the House Education Subcommittee — and Senator Roger Manno (D-Montgomery-District 19) are working with parents and educators to pass The Less Testing, More Learning Act of 2017 (HB461/SB452). The legislation would limit all federal, state, and district mandated standardized testing to 2% of the state’s required instruction hours each school year — or 21.6 hours in elementary and middle schools, and 23.4 hours in high schools. The bill passed the House of Delegates unanimously last year, and now has 31 co-sponsors in the Senate (two-thirds of the chamber).
That would require 17 school districts (seven districts have no grade levels above the 2% limit) to reduce 911 combined hours of standardized testing each year. And the legislation says districts have to form stakeholder committees, including school-level educators, to decide which tests to keep and which tests to shorten or eliminate. So the professionals who are actually implementing the tests can have a say about what their students really need.
The legislation would also eliminate one of the few state testing mandates: a high school social studies standardized exam (the Government High School Assessment). In order to ensure civics are still given priority in schools, the legislation instead asks the districts to design a performance-based assessment (for example, students perform tasks or keep a portfolio of schoolwork) to track student competency in that subject. This reform would cut an additional 54 hours of mandated testing across all 24 school districts — for a total reduction of 965 hours.
Really, all this legislation does is say that 98% of the school year should be used for instruction. Twenty hours of testing is more than enough to make sure students are making sufficient progress. It’s just getting rid of the excess that cuts into field trips, the arts, lab experiments, physical education, and all of the other components of a well-rounded education that drives a passion for learning.
Our students deserve less testing and more learning — and if districts won’t act on their own, the state should step in. Click here to contact your representatives in Annapolis and urge them to support the bill.
