With one of the most trying periods in the nation’s educational history barely behind them, educators are already looking ahead to a new school year full of unknowns. President Trump and Education Secretary DeVos are pushing to return students to classrooms for reasons having mostly to do with the president’s reelection bid. With the pandemic surging and substantial percentages of parents telling pollsters that they won’t send their children into school buildings in the fall, educators are facing far greater challenges than the president’s “back to school” edicts suggest.
Among them is an urgent need to understand students’ academic and social-emotional status after a long and, for many, harrowing absence from school, to guide teachers in the resumption of instruction and to gauge systemwide achievement trends. To help educators and education policymakers with these tasks, FutureEd has produced Blueprint for Testing: How Schools Should Assess Students During the Covid Crisis, a series of recommendations for what testing to do, for what purposes, and when.
Written by FutureEd Senior Fellow Lynn Olson, the report draws on FutureEd’s extensive work on standardized testing and on the insights of the more than two dozen testing experts we consulted for the project. It includes sections on measuring students’ emotional well-being, classroom diagnostics, and the best way to resume statewide standardized testing required by federal law.
While each state and school district will have to develop its own testing plan for the year ahead, based on its own resources and challenges, we hope these recommendations will provide a valuable starting point.
We have also published other resources in recent weeks to help educators and education policymakers navigate the challenges of the COVID crisis, including:
A survey capturing distance learning’s impact on the teaching force
A graphic summary of re-opening practices in the U.S. and abroad
An analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on college admissions testing
A first-person account of teaching under quarantine by 2017 National Teacher of the Year Sydney Chaffee
And insights from FutureEd Research Director Matt Kraft on the troubling loss of teaching time in the nation’s pre-Covid classrooms
Here’s hoping that the nation’s educators are able to get some time to recharge during July. The months ahead promise to be daunting.
Best wishes,
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University [email protected]
@thomas_toch
