Advice for Districts: Don’t Give More Tests — Give the Right Tests

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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. 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 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. 

Although the problem is layered, the solution is straightforward: Districts need fewer, more instructionally useful assessments. A strategic approach can transform how schools measure progress, decrease costs and stress, and help students and teachers focus on what matters: learning. 

In our organizations’ work helping states and school systems use more effective assessments, we’ve seen district leaders make great decisions that resulted in more streamlined exams. (Together, we’ve published a playbook to guide other districts through a similar process.) We recommend that every district take these four actions:

Build a unified leadership team. Districts must bridge internal divisions among departments. A strong assessment redesign team should involve curriculum leaders, testing experts and specialists in multilingual and special education (at minimum) to establish the purpose and guiding principles for assessment planning, asking how exams contribute to and and help measure progress toward achieving the district’s broader vision for learning.

Audit and streamline tests. Districts must scrutinize every exam: What is its purpose? Does it deliver insights that educators can use to plan their next moves with students? Which truly help teachers teach, and which are just filling up time? By focusing on fewer but higher-quality assessments, districts can reclaim valuable instructional time and ensure that every test adds value for teachers and students. ANet’s assessment audit across Louisiana revealed that seventh-graders were losing up to 22 instructional days per year due to a bloated assessment system. Post-audit, 15 Louisiana districts reclaimed an average of five days of school per year.

Engage educators in the redesign. Teachers bring a critical perspective to assessment selection and use. Districts should bring educators into the process early and often, seeking their insights on which exams work, which don’t and how testing can be improved. In Syracuse, the district’s leadership team convened a committee of teachers and principals who reviewed the nearly 70 local assessments for K-8. With this educator input, the district eliminated many duplicative assessments and clarified the purpose and use of data from others. 

Communicate the new approach. If educators understand why certain tests were removed and which remain, they’ll get on board, and when teachers are invested, students benefit. We recommend first cultivating the support of a team of influential educators and community leaders. In our work with districts across multiple states, there was a clear trend: Districts that engaged parents and teachers early — explaining the “why” behind changes — saw higher buy-in and smoother implementation​. After a well-communicated assessment redesign process in Madison, 97% of school leaders supported the district’s vision for the role of assessments, up from 44%. 

Exams don’t have to be a burden. By committing to fewer, more purposeful assessments, districts can lighten the load on educators and sharpen their focus on student outcomes systemwide. We’ve seen districts successfully transform their approach to assessment and witnessed the pain points in districts that have not yet done this critical work. 

The solution isn’t more tests, it’s the right tests. That’s how to give teachers the insights they need and students the learning they deserve. 

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