The pandemic has upended every area of society including education. Students in the Edgewater area have experienced many different education settings over the last year from fully remote learning, hybrid learning and in-person learning with masks and social distancing. The impact of the pandemic on student learning and mental health is still being quantified and we still don’t know the full extent of the impact.
Just yesterday, the acting assistant education secretary of the U.S. Department of Education announced that states must go ahead with standardized testing this spring. Colorado lawmakers are still pushing to suspend state testing despite the federal decision on testing.
Since 2014, our organization, Edgewater Collective has been engaged in collaborative work to track student learning and ensure that all students in our area can succeed from cradle to career. We follow state standardized test results known as (Colorado Measures of Academic Success) CMAS. Following these data points allows us to see bright spots of what is working for students and look deeper at the practices and systems at schools in other school districts that are seeing growth for students that face learning hurdles. We need data points from standardized tests to ensure that our local students are receiving the best education possible and to ensure education equity. This is a justice issue because 90% of our students face the hurdles of poverty and 80% of students in this area are Latino and have been historically marginalized.
Though I believe deeply in utilizing data to shine a spotlight on what is working and ensure that students are receiving the best education available, testing this spring is not wise. After losing learning hours in the classroom since last March, testing students for days over allowing them access to teaching and learning in the classroom is not a wise use of time.
Some will say that we need the CMAS testing results to measure the learning lost from the pandemic. Though this is an important point, CMAS results aren’t shared with schools and families until the fall of 2021. These test results can’t be used this spring and summer to ensure that students get the support they need academically. As others have pointed out, the environment that students will take the tests will be different. Some might be taking the tests online at home, some might be taking the tests at school and others will just skip the test all together. This makes it hard to compare results to prior years.
Federal and state education leaders should be focused on ensuring that students have as much learning time this spring as possible instead of focusing on testing. Our local schools utilize MAP testing to measure student learning at the beginning of the year, middle of the year and end of the year. This test does not take multiple days and gives students and teachers an idea of where extra support and learning is needed. We have multiple years of data on MAP results for area students that can be used to measure student learning and growth during the pandemic. More should be done to ensure that MAP data is made public so community partners can come alongside schools to offer equitable support and programming. For Jeffco Public Schools, we need to see MAP data by articulation area instead of just the district data. These results should also be shared with parents and families so they know where their student is academically.
We are deeply committed to ensuring that our local students, teachers and families have access to the right resources so they can succeed from cradle to career. This spring and summer we are offering free academic programming to help students recover from a different learning environment during the pandemic. In the spring of 2022, federal and state leaders should ensure that students take the CMAS tests so that we can measure student growth across school districts. But the spring 2021 is not the year to require schools to administer the CMAS tests.
Teachers need to be allowed to teach this spring instead of committing multiple days for testing.
Teaching over testing.
Joel has been a resident of Edgewater, Colorado with his family since 2012. He is the Executive Director of local education nonprofit Edgewater Collective and Editor of the Edgewater Echo.
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