Flashback to Spring 2019.

No one knows what COVID-19 means. January 6 has no meaning beyond a date on the calendar. “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X is taking over the Billboard music charts and Game of Thrones is airing its last episodes.

The Class of 2025 is in 6th grade, and they’re taking state tests, something they’d been doing every spring since 3rd grade. They’re supposed to take tests in 7th and 8th grade too, but those tests would be canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oregon freshmen and sophomores don’t take state tests.

Fast forward to 2024 — and a lot has changed. This spring, the Class of 2025, now 11th graders, are taking state assessments for the first time in five years, and for the last time in their school career.

But the state’s testing system doesn’t really work the way it’s intended to. Thousands of Oregon 11th graders decline to take state tests every year, which undermines the validity of the results as an actual gauge of student progress. Some teachers don’t think the tests are worth the disruption to class time. And even in the best of circumstances, education researchers acknowledge that state tests are just one data point among many to assess student progress. Both the lack of participation — and the lack of data — raise a central question for the Class of 2025 and other Oregon students: do the test results actually tell us how students are doing?

At David Douglas High School, where about half of the Class of 2025 students attend high school, English testing recently wrapped up.

“It went fine — I have no idea how I did,” Class of 2025 student Dude said.

He also recently took his math test, a subject he struggles with more as a high schooler than when he was younger.

“I think I’m less confident now — math is way harder than elementary, but English, I feel fine.”

“I tried my best,” classmate Joel said of his English assessment.

Class of 2025 student Ava says the last time she remembers taking state tests was all the way back in elementary school.

“We’d all go into a computer lab all at once and take it all together,” Ava recalled. “At first, I was really bored by it and I didn’t like it.”

This time around, Ava said she put effort into her English test, using it as a “check-in” to see her progress.

“A lot of students didn’t really care about it and just wanted to get it over with — but I feel like for me it was a good exercise to figure out how far I was and how experienced I am at writing essays,” she said.

Spring is state testing season in Oregon, when students in grades 3 through 8, as well as 11th graders, take tests in math and English. Students in 5th, 8th, and 11th grade also take science tests.

In Oregon and 11 other states, students spend several days at a time taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

It’s one of many ways schools learn how students are progressing academically. Districts use other assessments, like MAP tests, which are intended to measure growth over the course of the school year, especially for elementary and middle school students. And just about every teacher assesses their own students throughout the year.

But from a statewide perspective, the SBAC in 11th grade is one of the only ways to see how high school students statewide are faring academically. It’s also one of the few standardized exams researchers and policymakers use to compare student achievement across state lines. And for the Class of 2025, it’s the last big assessment before they graduate from high school.

When the Class of 2025′s results come back next school year, many will be paying attention. This spring is the first time juniors have taken the tests since they were in 6th grade, before the pandemic.

The results of this spring’s testing may offer insight into how this group of students is faring academically and recovering from the educational impacts of the pandemic and distance learning.

State assessments as a measure of “adult accountability”

State tests are required by federal law under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Over the years, the way they’ve been administered has varied in Oregon and across the country.

But state tests are a summative assessment measure — they’re meant to test what students have learned near the end of a school year.

Northwest Regional Education Service District superintendent Dan Goldman compares it to judging how well you prepared a dinner after you’ve served it.

“The meal is already cooked — you can’t really change the thing, now you have to eat it,” Goldman said. “But you can basically be like, ‘did that taste good?’ and the next time you make the food, you change the recipe.”

In other words, the spring state tests are less about helping the students who take them and more about improving the school system.

Andrea Lockard, Director of Assessment and Student Reporting at the Oregon Department of Education, suggests state test results are like a pixel in an image — a small piece of a puzzle that helps both district and state leaders get a clearer picture of how well schools are serving students.

“It helps us to identify different spots that are bright spots that we can learn from and it identifies different grow spots where we can lean into and improve,” Lockard said.

Tracking how well students do on state tests is also meant as an accountability measure. At the federal level, it’s a funding requirement.

“For schools that are getting the federal dollars, we want to have that assessment, so we know where the gaps are,” said U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Oregon.

At the state level, these tests are used to “examine the health” of Oregon’s public education system and make “big system annual decisions about curriculum and instructional effectiveness,” said the Oregon Department of Education’s Dan Farley.

For districts, the results from state tests are also used to make big decisions — like figuring out where to invest resources or what training is needed for teachers.

“It’s kind of an adult accountability and being able to fine-tune your systems is probably the most valuable use of that data,” said John Lynch, David Douglas School District student information data analyst.

At the high school level, David Douglas Director of Technology and Assessment Derek Brown says the test is supposed to be a measure of where students are in terms of college and career readiness using the Common Core state standards as a measure. But if a student’s proficiency level is low on the test, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to graduate.

“It’s just meant to say, your trajectory to get through high school and kind of meet that standard looks a little different than someone else,” Brown said. “To me — that’s still valuable information.”

But the information coming out of the test results is only as good as the test data going in. And there are big caveats surrounding that data. For one, many students opt out of the tests — depriving schools of insight on those students. Second, it’s hard to know how much effort students are making on a test that doesn’t count toward their grades. And, there are factors that have nothing to do with their school, like student mobility. For districts where many students have changed schools, will those test results be an adequate measure of how the student’s current school system is doing?

Lack of state testing data for Class of 2025

While states and districts use assessment data to help inform their decision-making, teachers — the most important factor in student achievement — largely don’t.

Tyler Scialo-Lakeberg taught high school juniors before becoming the president of the Salem-Keizer Education Association.

“My classes and their learning experience were disrupted for 6 weeks as they went through the testing window,” she recalled in an email to OPB.

She said a third of her class would be called out of class for testing at a time, which made it “very difficult to move forward.”

“Students were exhausted mentally from the testing,” she said, “and I didn’t want to create work that a third of students would have to make up.”

All of that disruption, Scialo-Lakeberg points out, for assessment results teachers won’t see until the next school year.

“By that time, I no longer have the same students in class,” she said.

Portland Association of Teachers president Angela Bonilla called testing a “waste of time” for educators.

“What I have heard from educators is that [Oregon’s Statewide Assessment System] testing is a measure to hold districts accountable for instruction, but we end up spending more time preparing for and administering this irrelevant test than we do connecting the test information to instruction,” Bonilla said in an email to OPB.

“It is a snapshot in time of how well students can take a test; it doesn’t measure if a kid made strides in learning.”

Both Scialo-Lakeberg and Bonilla say other assessments — from weekly quizzes and conferences to in-the-moment student check-ins — are more useful to teachers.

Officials both at the district and state level cite a variety of other data points, including attendance rates, 9th-grade on track percentages, grade point average, dual credit enrollment, and results on Advanced Placement tests as important gauges of how students are doing.

Those data points have been collected for the last five years and for the Class of 2025.

In the David Douglas district, Brown said they’ve been using other information to fill in the gap missing from state assessment results.

“I don’t think those data points were holes that we were worried about,” Brown said, citing 9th grade on track and attendance as points they’ve focused on instead.

“My guess is the state test results specifically aren’t going to tell us a bunch of new things about these kids that we didn’t already know from experiencing their freshman, sophomore, and junior years with them,” said Derek Brown.

Goldman at Northwest Regional ESD is more interested in qualitative sources of information rather than things like test scores. He said hearing from students and families through things like empathy interviews “get people’s experiences into the conversation.”

We won’t know how the Class of 2025 did on state tests until next school year when they’ll be seniors. But that doesn’t stop teachers from working with students to get them to graduation, Brown said.

“Whatever those results look like, I think our educators right now are working with those kids and collecting information in other ways and they’re poised to continue to provide the support they believe is necessary to get the kids across the stage and shaking hands with our superintendent and getting their diploma,” Brown said.

The first thing state officials will be looking for?

How many students actually took the tests.

In Oregon, opting out of tests is permitted. And in several school districts, high schoolers opt out of these tests in droves.

Are state test results invalid when fewer than 20% of districts reach participation benchmark?

The federal government requires 95% participation in state tests. Yet in Oregon and a handful of other states, families can opt out of testing.

That means participation in testing can vary widely, with high schools having the lowest rates.

In Oregon’s 20 largest school districts, 11th-grade participation rates ranged from 11% on math tests in Redmond to rates in the 80% range on English tests in Salem-Keizer, Medford and North Clackamas. Fewer than six in 10 Portland juniors took math or English exams. Of those 20 largest districts, only one — Greater Albany Public Schools — managed to reach 95% participation, in either subject.

ODE’s Dan Farley said a lack of participation “undermines” the purpose of the Oregon summative testing system.

“When we don’t have participation rates that are above at least 80%, we really don’t have a complete picture of what’s happening, or how well our students are learning,” Farley said.

Farley said 80% participation is a recommendation from a state technical advisory committee. Still, many districts fall short of the 80% target at the high school level.

There are many reasons a family might opt out of testing for their student and few incentives to take the test. Until 2020, high school seniors needed to prove they had reached proficiency in “essential skills,” through specific measures, including SBAC scores, as a graduation requirement. Now, state officials say, “These tests are not designed to determine if a student should graduate from high school.”

Vince Swagerty, superintendent of the small coastal North Bend School District, said that change has sometimes made getting students to participate challenging.

“You try to talk kids into taking the test, and they say, you know, it doesn’t really matter,” Swagerty said. “The interesting thing is it’s not just the kids who might not be as successful — it’s the kids who are clearly going to ace it. They’re just not interested. ‘Why waste the time?’”

Some school districts have expressed concern over how lack of student participation might affect their district.

David Douglas is an outlier among Oregon’s largest school districts, with high school participation rates ranging from 88.5% in English last school year to 92% participation in science.

Class of 2025 student Josh said he took his time with his English test this year and gave it the same effort he would for a test in class.

“I’ll still do it the same way I would do in a regular class just because it’s for the state, everybody’s going to see how the state of Oregon’s academic rate is,” Josh said.

But that’s just one district. And for some, low participation renders low trust in the assessment results.

NWRESD Superintendent Dan Goldman oversees an agency that works with 20 member districts. But before that, he was a high-level administrator in two different Oregon districts. Back then, he used assessment data like the officials at David Douglas or North Bend do, to evaluate programs and make sure a school is serving its students.

If he were in those district roles now, would he trust the data?

“No, I would not,” he said. “I would not feel the same level of trust in them.”

Goldman said the state’s opt-out policy renders the use of the tests too flawed to be useful. Instead, he says both the media and the legislature use state assessment data to unfairly rate and judge schools.

“It’s just extremely damaging to school communities and communities at large, and schools are a big part of how communities feel about themselves,” he said.

Goldman said although assessments are necessary for accountability, Oregon’s current system does not live up to that purpose. He suggests lawmakers who evaluate schools based on their test results are the same people who pass laws that depress test scores.

“The legislature, through the opt-out scenario here, has itself lowered its own accountability for schools and it makes it very difficult for us to have a real conversation internally and externally about whether our schools are meeting the needs of our kids when you can no longer use these assessments for that purpose,” Goldman said.

He also points out the gaps in who opts out of state testing. “The students who are not taking the assessment are more likely to come from higher income homes, they are more likely to be a white, homogenous group,” Goldman said.

In one school district, raising participation increased tie between results and reality

State officials know there’s a participation problem. In spite of teachers like Bonilla in PPS and Scialo-Lakeberg in Salem-Keizer suggesting tests are a waste of time for students and educators, state officials are hoping teachers can help make the case for participation.

“It’s almost more of a social stewardship role for students,” Farley said. “What they get out of it is information about their learning that the state has validated, which is useful compared to other sources of information that they have.”

Officials in the small North Bend School District are trying to get participation rates back up after years of “almost inviting” families to opt out of tests by sending the necessary forms home with students.

“We’re putting systems in place where we’re [...] we’re actually encouraging them to take the test,” Swagerty said.

Those systems have paid off. Last year, high school participation in testing jumped 24 percentage points, from 50 to 74%. Martin and Swagerty say this year’s testing participation has been even higher.

Higher participation is important at North Bend, as they’ve started receiving reports from ODE that use detailed state assessment data to give school districts a better idea of student achievement over time.

Bruce Martin, the district’s director of Teaching and Learning, has worked in the district for more than 30 years. In the past, he said state tests have been a high-stakes check for districts and school leaders on whether students have learned what they should have.

With the new state reports, school leaders can more easily use results at the beginning of the year to help focus teaching and learning efforts. Martin said annual assessment results can help school leaders and teachers know what to include in more regular assessments for students.

“We can target areas that we see deficiencies within our curriculum,” Martin said. “Once we look at those areas and know what they are, we can begin to target those and improve our instruction.”

In North Bend, those in-depth conversations have mostly focused on the elementary level, but Martin says there’s interest at North Bend High.

When the Class of 2025′s state assessment results come back, Martin and Swagerty say they’ll be looking for improvement — and signs that students are recovering from lost learning during the pandemic and that the district’s use of state and federal funding is proving to be effective.

“It would give us hope that we’re going to get to the other side of this generational impact that loss of instruction during COVID kind of saddle these kids with,” Swagerty said.