CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A new bipartisan Ohio Senate bill would allow the state to seek federal approval for canceling testing, as schools seek to recoup learning losses from a sudden switch to remote learning.
The bill would also continue a freeze on state report cards, yearly performance assessments that can have heavy consequences for school districts. The legislature canceled state testing and froze the report cards in the spring, as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools across the state.
The bill would remove state tests for this school year and would prompt the state to ask for a waiver on fulfilling federal testing requirements. If the state does not receive that waiver, Department of Education officials would need to figure out which tests to administer to meet federal requirements.
The legislature would give districts breathing room to figure out just how much of a dent the coronavirus pandemic made in student progress. The bill also continues a freeze on state’s EdChoice Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers for public school students in certain districts to attend private schools.
The bill currently sits in the Senate education committee.
Some schools have reopened fully to in-person classes, but others are either operating in hybrid models and about 24 percent are opening remotely. The hasty switch to online learning in the spring left some students without connection to districts, as officials discovered the extent of the state’s digital divide. Attendance rules were relaxed and focused on content completion, and teaching was asynchronous -- meaning that students weren’t having real-time interaction with teachers.
After having months to prepare, remote instruction looks closer to an in-person school day, with structured bell schedules and more resources to keep students connected.
“Time will need to be dedicated to getting students back on track before advancing to new content, making this a difficult year to meet “normal grade level” standards and benchmarks,” Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper said in testimony. “Furthermore, given that there are still a lot of uncertainties about when the learning environment will return to normal, conditions are not optimal for either learning or testing.”
The Ohio Federation of Teachers represents 55 unions with about 22,000 members. Cropper’s testimony supported both the report card and testing freezes, as well additional provisions in the bill like suspending teacher evaluations and flexibility for the state’s graduation requirements and Third Grade Reading Guarantee.
Cropper, in a phone interview with cleveland.com on Wednesday, said the state should use this opportunity to reassess the requirements it places on districts. Schools provide much more than just teaching, she said, noting the spotlight the coronavirus placed on some of these services, like food and mental health services.
“We have to understand the hierarchy of needs,” Cropper said. “If basic requirements aren’t being met, we can be the best teachers in the world and they’re not ready to learn because they’re hungry or because they’re being shifted around from house-to-house. Part of the schools’ responsibility does have to be how to meet those needs so we can teach them, so we do have to wrap that into an accountability system.”
What does the future of state testing look like now?
To help with district concerns about learning loss, the Ohio Department of Education created an online portal with “benchmark assessments” that teachers can use in the classroom. The tests, designed to figure out student progress toward state testing standards, were created from a state pool of questions.
Chris Woolard, the senior executive director of the Center for Performance and Impact at the Ohio Department of Education, said the state wanted to offer some support on assessments that didn’t come from a third-party vendor and were aligned with the goals districts need.
He said although testing hasn’t been at the forefront of district leaders’ minds, as fall begins there have been some more logistics questions about how testing will work.
All testing through the portal is voluntary, and districts do not need to share the data from these assessments.
The Ohio Department of Education cannot waive state testing on its own, which is why the legislature would need to pass a measure to seek a federal waiver. In the spring, President Donald Trump’s administration waived all standardized testing requirements for students K-12 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
There has not been a similar move for the fall, as the Trump administration continues to push for students to be back in schools. Several states have made progress toward asking for these waivers, but might not have much luck. Previously, the assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy analysis at the federal Department of Education said it was not the department’s “inclination” to grant those waivers again, EdWeek reported.
What about the EdChoice provisions?
The bill in its initial draft would freeze the indicators that would make a district eligible for EdChoice vouchers. The state’s EdChoice program uses a number of performance assessments and test results to determine whether students in that district should be able to receive tax-funded vouchers to attend private schools.
School choice advocates say this gives families a financial boost to make decisions about what’s right for their students. But public school advocates say the vouchers are based on a flawed system and drain districts of resources -- without funding, it can be difficult for leaders to make the changes necessary for students to excel.
Last spring, legislators put a hold on the districts where EdChoice vouchers were available, but allowed current students receiving EdChoice vouchers to keep them. Siblings of students who received EdChoice scholarships and students who had previously opted out of taking the vouchers are also eligible.
The bill would extend the provisions for the 2020-2021 school year.