On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a plan for K-12 education. It is expansive and expensive, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for impoverished children, aggressive efforts to promote racial integration, and sharp limits on federal support for charter schools.
Warren also pledged to “eliminate high-stakes testing,” a promise that has appeal to the public, which has widespread misgivings about such testing. She declared, “As president, I’ll push to prohibit the use of standardized testing as a primary or significant factor in closing a school, firing a teacher, or making any other high-stakes decisions.”
That language sounds like a blow against the school reform movement, which has long championed holding schools accountable for test scores, especially the achievement of low-income and minority students. But when pressed on the issue, the Warren campaign responded in a way that suggests her plan would do almost nothing to alter the use of standardized testing in K-12 schools.
The key words here are “significant factor” and “other high-stakes decisions.” To understand why, we need to go back to 2015, when Congress was in the middle of contentious negotiations over revising the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The previous version of the act, the No Child Left Behind Act, passed Congress with wide bipartisan support in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush, who enthusiastically supported school reform. It required states to administer standardized math and reading tests in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Schools where too few students scored as “proficient” on the tests were subject to an escalating series of interventions and sanctions.
Over time, No Child Left Behind became deeply unpopular. Critics said it was unjust to hold schools educating students from vastly different social and economic circumstances to the same standards. People also objected to using tests as the sole measure of school performance. When negotiators convened in 2015, it was clear that the heavy reliance on standardized testing would need to be scaled back. The question was how much.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the powerful chairman of the Senate Education Committee, was on the side of those deferring to the long-standing role states have played in financing and governing K-12 schools. If states didn’t want to use standardized tests, he believed, the federal government shouldn’t compel them. Alexander was joined by national teachers’ unions, which saw No Child Left Behind as a punitive law that unfairly demonized their members.
On the other side were Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House education committees and the Obama administration. They believed it was crucial for standardized tests to remain the backbone of school accountability for the same reason that schools don’t let high schoolers grade their own algebra exams and the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t let corporations invent their own accounting rules. Accountability requires objectivity. That’s why the tests are standardized and scored by state departments of education.
Murray, Scott and Obama administration officials were especially concerned with the progress of low-income and minority children, students with disabilities, and those from families where English was not the primary language spoken at home. Historically, states left to their own devices have not always acted with the best interests of such children in mind.
At one point in the 2015 negotiations, Warren voted against a version of the bill because, she later said, it lacked “minimum safeguards” and needed “stronger accountability” to ensure that federal dollars reached “those schools and students who needed them most.” It was a view of accountability substantially based on standardized tests.
A protracted debate over language threatened to scuttle the whole deal. Obama administration officials wanted tests to be the “primary” method of measuring school success. Republicans and teachers’ unions pushed back. The final compromise allowed states to include several additional measures in their school ratings, including high school graduation rates and metrics of student growth on tests, which give credit when scores improve but still fall short of proficiency.
Each of these indicators must be given “substantial weight” and, collectively, “much greater” weight than another set of newly added indicators that include measures of school safety and student “engagement.”
That’s why Warren’s use of the phrases “significant factor” and “high-stakes decisions” could be, in theory, a big deal. “Significant” sounds a lot like “substantial,” and the identification of low-performing schools for interventions and penalties is generally what people mean when they refer to, or call for the elimination of, “high-stakes testing.”
And yet, when pressed on this question, the Warren campaign repeatedly declined to confirm that those words mean what they seem to mean. A Warren aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say that the Warren plan changes or undoes the 2015 compromise. Instead, the aide referred back to the specific examples cited in the plan, saying that Warren does not believe tests should be used to close schools or fire teachers.
That means the Warren plan, if enacted, would change very little, because standardized tests are hardly ever used to close schools or fire teachers today. According to Chad Aldeman, an analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, only 231 of the nation’s 98,000 public schools were taken over by the state because of bad test scores during the No Child Left Behind years. Of those, nearly 80% were in a single state, Hawaii, which lacks local school districts to do the taking over. Fewer still were converted to charter schools. Even after the Obama administration pushed states to create teacher evaluation systems that incorporated some test data, real-world examples of test-driven systems being used to fire teachers are practically nonexistent.
Two-thirds of public school parents said there is “too much emphasis” on standardized tests in their community’s schools. Nearly half believe parents should be able to excuse their children from taking such tests, a sentiment fueling the testing “opt-out” movement in New York and elsewhere. Obama called for a cap on the amount of time students spend taking tests, a move Warren supported.
While the other major Democratic presidential candidates haven’t included similar anti-testing language in their platforms, they have also shied away from the kind of strong accountability stances that previous presidents of both parties have embraced.
Yet every state continues to use tests to rate schools and provide the public with information about student learning. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, despite her enthusiasm for private-school vouchers, has duly implemented the accountability compromise of 2015. High-stakes standardized tests are a durable, integral part of modern K-12 education. And that’s something that Warren does not really seem willing to change.
This article originally appeared in
.