Advocacy
Testing
Standardized testing takes far too much time away from learning, preventing students from developing well-rounded skills and a love for school. Standardized testing takes away the opportunity for students to learn about art, music, finance, and physical education—subjects that keep kids engaged and give them a well-rounded education.
And it’s not just the tests themselves—hours upon hours of test prep, practice tests, and even “pretend tests” to check testing technology results in fewer class projects and field trips and more stressed out and burned out students. Educators know that too much standardized testing doesn’t help their students do better in school—or in life. That’s why we are strong proponents of guaranteeing that more time is spent on learning and instruction and less on testing.
Our Work with the General Assembly to Reduce Over-Testing
Following our Time to Learn efforts in the 2015 General Assembly session—including passing a bill to form a statewide Commission to Review Maryland’s Use of Assessments in Public Schools—MSEA launched our Less Testing, More Learning campaign to highlight the need to reduce mandated standardized testing. By empowering the voices of teachers and education support professionals in TV, radio, and digital ads, letters to the editor, press conferences, and media interviews, as well as emails, phone calls, and lobby meetings with legislators, we moved the testing issue squarely onto the General Assembly’s to-do list.
Since the launch of that campaign, we have scored several important wins for our students, including:
- The More Learning, Less Testing Act of 2017 (House Bill 461/Senate Bill 452) set a 2.2% cap on the amount of instructional time that could be used annually for mandated standardized testing (the cap is 2.3% in eighth grade). The Act eliminated an estimated 730 hours across 18 districts when it went into effect during the 2018–2019 school year. The Act also created District Committees on Assessments—which are designed to bring educators, parents, and district officials together to study existing assessments and decide on ones that weren’t necessary. There is much work to be done at the local level; at the time of the passage of the bill, for every hour of state-mandated testing, there were five hours of district-mandated testing.
- The Protect Our Schools Act of 2017 (House Bill 978/Senate Bill 871) reshaped how Maryland judges its schools to emphasize test scores less and incentivize schools to focus more on things like school climate, class and caseload size, and offering a broad, challenging curriculum. It also prevents Gov. Hogan and his State Board of Education from doubling down on using test scores to identify public schools as failing so they can convert them into charters schools or close them down in favor of private school vouchers. While Gov. Hogan vetoed the bill to protect his school privatization agenda, the General Assembly overrode his veto before the end of the 2017 legislative session.
- Passed in 2016, House Bill 412/Senate Bill 533 required school districts to publicly disclose all mandated tests and how much time they take away from instruction each year.
While we have made great progress in putting an end to over-testing and guaranteeing less testing and more learning for our students, educators will remain vigilant to ensure that classroom instructional time is protected from counterproductive increases in mandated testing.