Educators are buried under a mountain of tests. While state-mandated exams often take the blame, the real culprit is the growing pile of district-mandated assessments layered on top of school-administered exams. School system leaders hear the same concern again and again: Teachers spend too much time administering assessments that, while often adopted with best intentions, don’t provide enough value.

Through our work with school districts such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Syracuse, New York, and states including Indiana and Louisiana, ANet and Education First have had a front-row seat to the challenges and opportunities in assessment strategy and assessment overload. We’ve seen what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to design a system that serves students and teachers. Too few districts actually know what they are trying to accomplish with all the tests they administer.

Districts should consider three issues in addressing assessment overload:

  • Test volume: Especially in grades K-8, teachers spend too much time preparing for and administering tests, while students lose precious classroom hours — as many as 100 per year — taking redundant exams instead of engaging in meaningful learning. Excessive testing and assessment overload exhausts students and frustrates teachers without always giving them what they need most: insights they can use to improve learning.
  • Usefulness of test reports: Most district-mandated assessments are off-the-shelf products that deliver results quickly but not necessarily usefully. Districts, teachers and families rely on these tests in good faith, only to receive data that compare students to one another (think percentiles) rather than to the grade-level standards they need to master.
  • Incoherence: To boost student outcomes, districts often add tests without retiring others. Leaders of various central office departments — special education, literacy, multilingual learning and the like — procure their own exams, without coordinating to consider “two for one” opportunities. The result is a tangled mess of assessments that overlap, confuse and overwhelm. In some districts, we’ve seen as many as 15 assessments in play, with each serving a different purpose.

Read the full article about assessment overload by Michelle Odemwingie and Jennifer Vranek at The 74.