PPS drops standardized tests for this spring

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, April 13, 2021

The Portland Public Schools Board of Education voted Tuesday night to skip the standardized testing students normally take in the spring, one more change to education due to the pandemic.

“It’s our recommendation that we not participate in state summative assessments this spring. (Although) we remain committed to accountability and the importance of data in helping us to continuously improve,” Guadalupe Guerrero, superintendent, said at a Board of Education meeting Tuesday, April 13.

Portland schools won’t participate in the Smarter Balanced standardized testing this year “to preserve the remaining instructional time for this academic year for the purpose of instruction and social-emotional support for our students,” the board’s resolution said.

“Given that we’re just now welcoming students back inside classrooms after more than a year in distance learning, we don’t think it makes sense to use the limited in-person time we have with students to administer the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) test,” Guerrero said.

Russell Brown, PPS chief of systems performance also said the tests had been altered, rendering them less useful to judge student growth and learning.

Considering “how the test has been changed, about the lack of time students have been in the classroom, about the cost to that instructional time, I don’t think there is any responsible way for us to administer the test this year,” said Board Chair Eilidh Lowery.

The board agreed to resume the normal testing schedules in the 2021-22 school year.

The Smarter Balanced and other standardized tests are designed to show where students are lagging and achieving. The test results are often used to help make decisions about what and how to teach and where a district’s money should be spent.

A board document said that if the Smarter Balanced test is administered this spring, the value of the test to make budget and instructional decisions “will be diminished because almost a third of PPS students remain in distance learning in addition to others students who opt-out” of testing. The tests cannot be administered remotely.

There are several standardized tests administered to students in a normal school year. This year PPS students in third through eighth grades had already taken the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) tests.

And, the district said the MAP “will be a better assessment of how are students are doing” in this year of mostly remote learning.

“There is not a lot of public support for doing this,” Brown said of the Smarter Balanced test.

The Oregon Department of Education has been going back and forth with the federal government over testing. The feds rejected Oregon’s first application for a testing waiver, but accepted a modified second application.

In an April 6 letter, the U.S. Department of Education acknowledged that “ODE will offer the assessments but not require them, and will provide information about the assessments to parents.”

Standardized tests have long been controversial in schools, but this year especially so.

Administrators in the district said they did not expect sanctions, such as a loss of federal funding, to be imposed as a result of not administering the required standardized tests.

Guerrero said in response to a board member’s question on possible consequences of not complying with the federal testing mandate, “We would have to engage in a corrective action plan, which would likely mean participating in all tests of the SBAC next spring.”