State tests are a familiar annual ritual—every spring, students in grades 3-8 take exams that assess what they know and are able to do in reading and math.
Mandated by federal accountability policy, these tests provide some of the most comprehensive data available on student achievement. They’ve also long been a flashpoint in education debates, with many advocates, educators, and parents claiming that preparing students to take them diverts valuable time away from classroom instruction.
Now, the role these assessments play may be changing.
President Donald Trump has directed his administration to “send education back to the states,” a move that observers say could lead to less federal oversight and looser enforcement of requirements.
At least one state superintendent, Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters, a Republican, has voiced interest in requesting a waiver from testing requirements enshrined in federal education law, saying that the state is “exploring how the tests can look different,” but not offering specifics.
But some assessment experts, state education chiefs, and advocates say that giving states too much leeway could obscure an important source of data for policymakers and the public.
“The idea that we’re sitting here needing to make the case [for testing] feels a little silly to me,” said Jessica Baghian, the president of the education consultancy Watershed Advisors, in an April 2 webinar hosted by the Center for Assessment. The organization advises states and districts on testing systems.
“If the alternative to doing state tests is not doing them, then it’s just a nonstarter for me,” Baghian said.
In the Center for Assessment’s webinar, participants discussed the role that state tests play, how they could be improved, and what moves states might make with more flexibility at the federal level. Read on for three takeaways.
1. State test data serve a host of purposes.
Test results help states and districts know where students are struggling, offer parents and the public transparency into school outcomes, and signal to teachers what goals it’s important for students to meet, panelists said.
Carey Wright, the state superintendent of schools in Maryland, said she used state test data to identify consistent strengths and weaknesses in student skills when she was state chief in Mississippi.
Under Wright’s leadership, the Magnolia State took on an initiative to improve early reading instruction, which included assigning literacy coaches to schools. State test data proved essential in directing coaches’ work, Wright said.
“It gave me an idea of, once they were deployed, what kind of professional learning was needed across our state,” she said.
She also used improvements in assessment scores to justify education spending to the state legislature. “You gave me X number of dollars for coaching—let’s talk about return on investment,” she said.
State tests aren’t “perfect,” said Scott Marion, the Center for Assessment’s executive director. But they meet high standards for technical quality—factors such as whether students who display the same abilities get the same score, or whether different districts can compare their scores.
And they’re specifically designed to be summative—to evaluate what students have gleaned from a year of schooling. That’s a different purpose than the commercially available interim assessments that many districts use to monitor student progress several times throughout the year, Marion said.
2. States should still work to ‘make these tests better year over year.’
For more than two decades now, opponents of annual state testing have argued there’s little overlap between good instruction and the kind of preparation students need to ensure that they get a high score on the assessment.
There’s widespread pressure to “teach to the test,” many educators say, eschewing lessons that ask students to think deeply, write expansively, and read longer texts in favor of training them to digest the short passages and answer multiple-choice questions common to state standardized tests.
This incoherence between assessment and instruction persists in too many places, said Baghian.
“If you have strong curriculum and weak multiple-choice tests, you’re sending mixed signals to the field about priorities,” she said. “There are a lot of states where the [English/language arts] exam … is multiple choice, find a quick hit answer, not particularly complex in language difficulty or in answering the questions.”
There are too few states where summative tests ask students to look at multiple texts, analyze them together, and produce original answers, she said.
“The question is, how can we make these tests better year over year and learn from places that are leading?”
Baghian also criticized states for not releasing state test results earlier in the year, often waiting until the fall to publish scores from tests taken the previous spring.
“The excuses on that are long worn out, and people have to speed up,” she said.
3. More flexibility could present opportunities—or ‘lower standards.’
If the Education Department is willing to give states more leeway through waivers from federal accountability requirements, states could use that to advance new assessment practices, Baghian said.
Baghian referenced a pilot project in Louisiana, where she was previously an assistant state superintendent, which aligned ELA assessments with the state’s teacher-developed ELA curriculum starting in 2018. The state began experimenting under the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority in the federal K-12 law.
In participating schools, students are tested on content that they’ve learned, or text that’s related to the content taught, rather than general comprehension passages—an approach designed to make tests a truer measure of students’ reading ability, rather than their general knowledge.
But few districts are participating in the pilot, and “the state has since walked away from it,” Baghian said—in part due to federal guardrails that stymied execution.
The U.S. Department of Education, under then-Secretary Miguel Cardona, in 2023 acknowledged some of the challenges with the demonstration program and encouraged more states to apply for it.
Separately, many states have considered using a “through year” design, in which components of an exam are given throughout the school year and rolled up into a final score. At least one state, Montana, won a one-year pilot for such a design in 2023.
Whatever flexibility may be offered or granted, doing away with tests entirely would be a mistake, said Wright.
“Even if the feds decide that they’re not going to require statewide assessment, that is not something that I’m going to buy into,” she said. “The moment you lower standards, you do kids a disservice and you do teachers a disservice.”
