Is Testing the Next Frontier in Ed Reform?

Image generated by AI (as you can probably tell)

Eight years ago, Louisiana’s top education official announced a bold experiment: a radically different kind of state reading test, one that would assess students’ learning based on what they had actually been taught.

What’s so bold and radical about that, I hear you say? (Or some of you, anyway—perhaps those who are new to this Substack.) Don’t states routinely test students on what they’ve been taught?

Well, yes and no. Standardized reading tests aim to measure students’ abilities to do things like find the main idea of a text or make an inference about what a word means in a particular context. In most schools, reading or ELA instruction focuses primarily on those kinds of skills. So in that sense, students are being tested on what they’ve been taught.

The problem, as then-state superintendent of Louisiana John White explained in a 2018 opinion piece, is that those skills don’t transfer from one context to another. To be able to make an inference, for example, you need a certain threshold of relevant background knowledge. Lots of kids lack enough background knowledge to make sense of the passages on reading tests, which are designed to avoid topics that might be covered in the school curriculum. A student might be asked to find the main idea of a passage on, say, rugby, when she’s never even heard of the sport.1

Kids from less highly educated families are particularly likely to lack the background knowledge they need for the tests. And the problem becomes most apparent at higher grade levels, when the test passages assume the reader possesses increasing amounts of knowledge and vocabulary.

In his 2018 op-ed, White announced that Louisiana had just submitted a proposal to the federal Department of Education to develop an “Innovative Assessment Pilot” under the recently passed ESSA legislation.2

“Rather than administering separate social studies and English tests at the end of the year,” White wrote, “Louisiana schools participating in the pilot will teach short social studies and English curriculum units in tandem over the course of the year, pausing briefly after each unit to assess students’ reading, writing and content knowledge. Students, teachers and parents will know the knowledge and books covered on the tests well in advance. Knowledge of the world and of specific books will be measured as a co-equal to students’