Students walk into Thelma R. Parks Elementary in Oklahoma City on the first day of school on Aug. 13. (Photo by Nuria Martinez-Keel/Oklahoma Voice)
OKLAHOMA CITY — When Carri Hicks thinks of state testing, she remembers the fourth grader in her classroom who threw up from the stress of the end-of-year exam.
A Democratic state senator and former public-school teacher from Oklahoma City, Hicks found herself in the uncommon position of agreeing with Oklahoma’s far-right Republican state superintendent, Ryan Walters, who on Friday abruptly proposed ending the state’s current “high-stakes” method of student testing this year.
“What I feel like we’re currently experiencing in our Oklahoma public schools is not the best of what that could look like,” Hicks said. “I do think that our current system of state testing is horrible.”
To some Oklahomans, especially those with an education background, Walters’ announcement was a welcome policy change, but criticism of his plan has emerged from voices on both sides of the debate.
Despite agreeing with Walters’ idea, Hicks was skeptical of his decision to announce such a significant change shortly before the start of the school year without first developing a plan with educators, district leaders and state lawmakers.
Last month, Walters similarly caught the entire state off guard with an order that all public schools provide cafeteria meals at no cost to students — a declaration that district leaders panned because of financial difficulties and a lack of legal basis.
“I feel like this is just a continuation of chaos instead of clarity,” Hicks said after the state testing announcement.
Under Walters’ proposal, Oklahoma would not administer state reading and math tests this school year to students in grades 3-8. Instead, each district would choose benchmark assessments to purchase from a private vendor.
Walters said scores from benchmark tests taken throughout the school year will better benefit students and educators because they reflect real-time learning.
“We’re not going to come tack on a government-required test at the end of the year,” he said. “What we’re going to do is what parents have said is actually actionable and helpful, what teachers say actually drives classroom practice, what administrators say would ease operations.”
Trump administration rejected similar proposal from Arizona
The Oklahoma State Department of Education is accepting public comment on the proposal through Sept. 8 before submitting it to the Trump administration.
Walters said he expects a “very quick” approval from the federal government, but the first Trump administration denied a similar plan from Arizona in 2018.
At the time, Arizona suggested a “menu” of assessment options that districts could choose from. The U.S. Department of Education rejected the idea and threatened to withhold federal funds if Arizona attempted it.
All students should take the same statewide test, federal officials decided.
“The requirements that all students are held to the same, high challenging academic standards and are assessed on the same statewide assessment form the basis for much of a state’s accountability system and provide essential and comparable information to parents and the public,” the federal agency wrote in a response to Arizona.
Last year, a nationwide test revealed all-time-low scores in fourth- and eighth-grade reading in Oklahoma while the state’s overall academic performance showed little to no progress since 2022.
Changing state tests won’t improve those outcomes, said Christy Hovanetz, a school accountability expert at ExcelinEd, an education think tank that advocates for rigorous testing.
States that try to change their assessments tend to do so to obscure poor results, she said.
“This looks like an attempt to muddy the waters so people don’t know what’s happening with student performance,” Hovanetz said.
Benchmark and state tests have ‘very different purposes’
Benchmark assessments have become a common, integral tool that many Oklahoma schools use in addition to the state tests. Students take these incremental assessments multiple times within the school year to gauge their learning progress.
Oklahoma City Public Schools uses this data “day in and day out,” said Jason Galloway, the district’s chief of staff.
Meanwhile, state test results aren’t released until two to three months after the school year has ended.
“Internally, we really refer to that as autopsy data,” Galloway said. “The learning has already taken place. It’s not data that we are using to make real-time instructional decisions.”
Other states, like Florida, produce their state test results within hours or days after students finish taking them, giving educators more time to use the data as they plan for the following school year, Hovanetz said. The difference, she said, is state leaders having the “political will” to publicize the scores sooner rather than later.
While benchmark assessments give up-to-date information mid-year, Hovanetz said state tests reveal whether the decisions a school made over the course of an entire academic year produced positive results.
“They’re two very different purposes,” Hovanetz said. “The state assessment should be a check on the system (to) make sure everything that happened throughout the year went well.”
Accomplishing Walters’ plan would be ‘extremely difficult,’ state official said
Walters’ proposal would add another layer of complexity by allowing Oklahoma’s 500-plus districts to choose from a variety of benchmark vendors.
Hovanetz said, in her experience, it’s not possible to put together an accurate, statewide picture of student performance with a mixture of different tests.
That issue has raised doubts among Oklahomans, as well.
The Education Department hasn’t shown how it would compare scores from various district-selected benchmarks, said Brent Bushey, CEO of Fuel OKC, a nonprofit focused on improving public-school quality in Oklahoma City.
“While the concept is attractive to me, it feels like this announcement came out before the (state Education Department) did the legwork to have a responsible program in place,” Bushey said.
Fairly comparing results across multiple tests will be “extremely difficult” and cost more money, said Megan Oftedal, executive director of the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.
OEQA is a small state agency that plays an important part in facilitating state testing. Oftedal said Walters didn’t consult OEQA or its board of commissioners when developing his plan.
The Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability, the board in charge of OEQA, casts the final vote on what state test score determines whether a student is proficient, advanced or behind in reading, math and other subjects. A time-consuming process involving multiple state agencies and several teacher committees leads up to that vote, which typically takes place once every six years.
Under Walters’ plan, Oklahoma would have to conduct that process over and over for each benchmark assessment approved, Oftedal said.
“These processes are costly, time-intensive, and raise concerns about efficient use of taxpayer dollars,” she wrote in an email to the commission, which Oklahoma Voice obtained.
State superintendent blames teacher unions for state testing failures
To Walters, that process is necessary to eliminate a “teachers union approach” he claimed has failed students.
“Standardized testing has crippled teachers’ ability to educate your children for far too long,” he wrote in a statewide message to parents.
However, the state’s largest teacher union, the Oklahoma Education Association, has long advocated against standardized tests, President Cari Elledge said. Its nationwide affiliate, the National Education Association, has been similarly critical.
“As a 5th-grade teacher, I have seen first-hand the effects of standardized testing on Oklahoma students,” Elledge said in a statement. “These tests only serve as stressful, one-day snapshots in a single school year. They are not representative of a student’s true academic progress.
“The State Superintendent continues to misrepresent and vilify Oklahoma educators’ voices instead of collaborating with them. It is disappointing but not surprising.”
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