This legislative session 108 bills have been filed dealing directly with education. That is a fairly light load compared to past years like 2024 when more than 250 bills were introduced. The good news is that this year there aren’t nearly as many “bad” bills that seek to undo or weaken some of the strong policies we have put into place, but there are some that are cause for concern. With Louisiana being heralded as part of the “Southern Surge” of state-led national education improvements, we think two of these bills would harm our state’s significant education gains and slow our momentum.
Standardized testing in public schools can be a touchy subject. While both state and federal law require students to take a certain number of tests each year, it is not uncommon to hear both parents and politicians complain about assessments. Of course, no one really likes taking a test, but at the same time they provide important measurements that help us more fully understand how our students are doing.
Two bills impacting state testing requirements concern us. HB 262 would eliminate the requirement that students take a state-administered end-of-course test to graduate from high school. Though Louisiana is now one of only a handful of states that still require passage of such a test – Texas and Florida are others – we believe these tests remain an important part of our education system.
Louisiana has had some sort of graduation testing requirement for more than 35 years. We started that practice even before we initiated our school accountability system because we found that students graduating from high school, sometimes with high GPAs, were performing poorly on the ACT and were not college ready even though the grades on their report cards suggested they should be.
Over the years we have found these tests add value for a variety of reasons:
- They provide a consistent measurement of student outcomes across schools and districts that reduces the subjectivity that often happens in teacher-graded tests.
- They ensure that students really have the skills to move to the next level of instruction, whether that be career and technical education or college.
- They provide incentives for schools to maintain their focus on all students by helping identify those who need extra help to succeed.
Currently, students are required to pass three standardized tests, one in English, one in math, and one in biology or civics. This is a reasonable requirement and helps ensure that students are truly ready to graduate from high school.
HB 818 would further reduce testing to a level that we believe would be detrimental to students. Current state law basically limits the amount of state-required testing to 2% of the minimal amount of instruction time required in a school year. This bill would include all federal and local testing requirements in that percentage. Implementing this legislation would turn our relatively modest testing requirement upside down and potentially put our local schools at a tremendous disadvantage.
While state tests are used for accountability purposes and to measure how well our students are performing, local standardized tests and screenings are most often used for diagnostic purposes. That means they are used to see how students are doing during the course of a school year so teachers can identify learning gaps and focus instruction to meet the individual needs of students.
Stated another way, they help teachers pinpoint where their students are struggling and then target interventions that are tailored specifically to help them improve in areas where they are having difficulty. These are important tools for schools to have because they help focus instructional time and other resources on the things that will actually make a difference for students, while also helping teachers see where they are making progress.
Effectively taking away the flexibility local school districts now have in administering these assessments ultimately hurts the students they are trying to educate and serve.
As this debate gets underway at the Capitol we should keep in mind that Louisiana is in the process of reducing the amount of standardized testing that is required at the state level. In recent years the testing times for grades 3-8 have been reduced by 20% for English and math, and 50% for social studies. High school tests will soon be reduced from six required tests to four.
Education Superintendent Cade Brumley has said that, while he agrees that it is a good idea to reduce testing time, he strongly supports the continued use of assessments to measure student outcomes and performance.
We believe that is the correct policy for Louisiana. Our education data has been recognized positively as part of the so-called Southern Surge of state’s making uniquely strong performance gains in reading and math.
It’s worth noting that it is a nationally administered standardized test that has documented Louisiana’s growth in these subjects and singled us out as one of the first states to recover from learning loss due to COVID. That is valuable information that we would have never had without a standardized test to quantify our gains compared to the rest of the country.
A discussion about how much testing we do in our schools is healthy, but we should be cognizant of the fact that these assessments provide real value to our state, our teachers, and most importantly the students and young people of Louisiana.