Teaching & Learning
Changes Coming to Oregon’s Systems of Assessment ANDREA SHUNK / Education Policy & Practice Strategist, OEA Center for Great Public Schools
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he 2020-21 school year had plenty of disruptions for educators and students. Among those disruptions were changes to Oregon’s assessment system. As we return to in-person instruction, educators and students can expect more changes coming. In this article, we will explain some of the statewide changes you can expect to come in the 2021-22 school year.
test to 11 percent at 11th grade. For the 2021-22 school year, school districts will be expected to comply with the state and federal mandate to administer the statewide summative assessments again. This means students in grades 3-8 and 11 will take both the language arts and math tests, and students in grades 5, 8, and 11 will take the Oregon science test.
Statewide Summative Assessments
The Oregon State Board of Education last changed the state graduation requirements in 2007. These changes included increasing the required number of credits to 24 and adding nine essential skills, deemed as skills that cross academic disciplines and included thinking critically, global literacy, and using technology. The board also added a requirement for graduates to demonstrate proficiency in three of the nine essential skills – reading, writing, and math. This proficiency requirement was in addition to the need to earn 24 credits with passing grades. Students could demonstrate proficiency in these three areas in several ways including the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the SAT and ACT, certain portions of the GED exam, WorkKeys, IB and AP exams, and locally created work samples. Most students in Oregon met this requirement via the Smarter Balanced Assessment during their junior year. The disruption of in-person learning in the spring of 2020 caused major disruptions to students’ ability to demonstrate proficiency in the essential skills. For the class of 2021 who were in 11th grade that spring, they lost the major opportunity to demonstrate proficiency by sitting the Smarter Balanced assessment, as no students in the state took the test. For the graduating class of 2020, some students lost the opportunity to complete work samples to demonstrate proficiency if they had yet to do so. As a result of this and the continued COVID-19 disruptions to in-person learning, the State
In spring of 2020, as schools around the country did an emergency pivot to online instruction, the U.S. Department of Education issued a blanket waiver allowing all states to forego the required statewide summative assessments in language arts, math, and science. For Oregon, this meant that no student took the Smarter Balanced Assessment or Oregon’s science assessment. In the 2020-21 school year, the Oregon Department of Education applied for a similar waiver that would have allowed the state to forego administering these tests. However, the U.S. Department of Education rejected that initial request. ODE amended the waiver, which was approved, and included the following changes: n Limit testing opportunities to only one or two subjects per grade. n Requesting an exemption from the federal requirement to test 95% of students. n Only allowing in-person testing. n Reducing the length of the test and eliminating the performance task requirement for the language arts and math tests. In the spring of 2021, several school boards and school districts made the choice to not administer any SBA or science assessments at all, given the time the tests take and how little time many students would have for inperson instruction. Overall, statewide participation this spring was quite low, ranging from 37 percent of students at 3rd grade taking the
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TODAY’S OEA | FALL/WINTER 2021
Essential Skills
Board suspended the essential skills graduation requirement for the graduating classes of 2020, 2021, and 2022. During this time, ODE completed a rigorous data analysis looking at how students in different groups demonstrated proficiency in the three essential skills. A major equity concern emerged from the data, which shows that white students predominantly meet this requirement by achieving a certain score on the Smarter Balanced Assessments while nonwhite students, particularly African American/Black students, meet this requirement through local work samples. This disproportionate data raises several equity concerns. In the 2021 legislative session, OEA led the successful campaign to pass Senate Bill 774, which suspends the essential skills graduation requirement through the class of 2024 and requires ODE to engage with educators, families, students, and other community groups to review: n Existing state high school diploma requirements n Research other graduation models in the nation n Examine local implementation of the requirements
