About two months into the academic year, Sammy Magnuson’s fifth grade class at Eaton Elementary School sat in front of laptops to take a math test.

Students were asked to multiply two-digit numbers by decimals, a concept they had not yet covered. The class average on the eight-question test – 39 percent – showed it.

“The questions were more advanced than how far we had gotten,” Magnuson said. “The kids still weren’t ready for it yet.”

It was not an exercise that Magnuson, a teacher of four years, chose to assign. Instead, the exam was part of a battery of new tests called Required Curricular Tasks, generally shortened to RCTs, introduced by D.C. Public Schools this academic year.

School system officials say the tests are a way to measure where students are academically, something desperately needed in the third school year disrupted by the pandemic.

But educators, including the president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, argue the tests are draining time from instruction and creating more stress for already overworked teachers. In some cases, the rigid assessment schedule is forcing teachers to teach lessons out of order.

And the computerized tests are creating challenges for children who have not yet learned typing skills, and for schools that do not have enough working computers.

“This is sitting kids in front of more technology, which is what they’ve had for the last year and a half,” said Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, who leads the teachers union. “Couldn’t we think of a better way to spend our time than constant assessments?”

‘It’s just a drain’

D.C. Public Schools introduced the new tests about a week before students returned to classrooms in August, releasing a 28–page document explaining the new expectations to teachers.

Administered in all grade levels from preschool through 12th grade, the RCTs are assigned in main subject areas: math, English, science, social studies, art, and, for older students, physical education. The tests do not apply to charter schools, which educate about half of the city’s students.

D.C. Public Schools teachers must administer the tests, which are developed by the school system to match its curriculum, within a two-week window also determined by the system. The frequency of the tests depend on the subject and grade level.

In the first ten weeks of school, the average first-grade student was expected to take six new tests across different subjects. During the same time frame, a high school student enrolled in World History II was expected to take three assessments in that subject alone.

That’s in addition to multiple exams that were already required by the school system, including i-Ready and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

Magnuson taught the same roster of students virtually last academic year, when they were fourth graders. She feels the testing is too time consuming and limits her ability to spend class time focusing on gaps that formed during distance learning.

This year she’s noticed her students are struggling to solve problems on their own, without help from online learning platforms that tell students when they answer a problem incorrectly. Children are also having a hard time sitting down to write for extended periods of time, she added.

“At the end of the day, it’s just a drain,” she said. “I just have this additional burden that is ironically slowing us down in a year we’re supposed to be accelerating our learning.”

Magnuson said she has administered seven of the new assessments so far this year; in total, her fifth graders will take more than 20 new exams throughout the academic year. The tests can range from 30 minutes each to an hour and a half, in addition to the time it takes to log each student into the online testing platform.

Teachers must sometimes administer tests before they feel their students are ready or skip over lessons to cover topics that will appear on the assessments, said Michael Donaldson, a Spanish teacher at Alice Deal Middle School in Chevy Chase.

“You’re changing the sequence that you would normally teach something or the way you teach it,” said Donaldson, who represents teachers at Alice Deal in the Washington Teachers’ Union.

A fourth grade math teacher in Ward 7 said more than 40% of her students started the academic year performing at a kindergarten grade level, according to scores from a different exam she was required to administer.

The teacher, who requested anonymity because she feared retribution from administrators for speaking out, said it’s unrealistic to expect that her students would perform well on the tests when they are so far behind.

“There’s kids coming back, [needing to remember] how to write their numbers,” the teacher said.

The technology itself is also creating additional burdens. Magnuson, for example, doesn’t have enough working laptops for a class of 23 children, so she has to borrow computers from other teachers to administer the exams.

A first grade teacher at an elementary campus in Ward 2 said her students were assigned a test where they were instructed to write a diary entry in the voice of a character from a reading assignment.

It was already a difficult task because the class was just learning to string together basic sentences. So the teacher, who also requested anonymity because she also fears retribution from administrators, said she set aside a couple of days to work on the exercise with her students. But the first graders ran into another problem on the day of the test: typing their essays into the online testing platform.

Most students had not learned to type and puzzled over their keyboards, straining to find the correct letters.

“I had a couple kiddos break down crying,” the teacher said. “It was very overwhelming for them.”

Helpful or harmful?

Educational tests fall into two main categories.

The first, summative assessments, are administered at the end of a unit, semester, or school year. They can include final exams, research papers, or standardized tests, where students are expected to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the material they learned.

The second, formative assessments, help teachers gauge how well students are grasping concepts as they learn. That can take different forms, including quizzes, projects, or having a child read aloud. These assessments are typically developed by teachers themselves.

Results on formative tests help teachers determine if they should make changes to instruction because students are struggling. They can also help educators figure out which children need extra support.

It’s that type of information D.C. Public Schools says it is trying to gather by having teachers administer the new tests.

“Particularly after the disruptions caused by the pandemic, it is important to have a consistent, grade level assessment of where our students are,” according to a statement from the school system.

Data that is already available illustrate how deeply virtual learning affected instruction.

Mirroring national trends, a report from EmpowerK12, a nonprofit that analyzes education data, found elementary and middle school students in D.C. performed far worse on standardized math and reading assessments last spring than their peers two years ago. The declines were steepest among Black and Latino children and students from low-income families, exacerbating pre-existing achievement gaps.

The report noted, for example, that just over half of K-2 students were reading on grade level – down 18 percentage points from before the pandemic. Within that group, just 31% of students considered at risk were reading on grade level, a 27 percentage point decline.

D.C. Public Schools officials acknowledged the challenges with the RCTs and said they would engage with educators on the feedback. But they did not respond to specific questions about the cost of creating the new assessments or explain how they planned to use test results to target more resources to schools in need. They also did not make DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee available for an interview.

Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University, said the tests can serve as a useful tool to understand where students are academically.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure. You want to know how kids are doing,” he said. “The challenge is to calibrate how much of this is enough versus how much is too much.”

Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, an organization that advocates against the “misuse” of tests, said he understands why school systems might want to make sure children are learning curriculum at a specific pace.

But he said standard assessments do not account for differences among students who do not learn at the same speed, or the disruptions to learning created by the pandemic.

“Part of the problem with assessments that are created outside of the classroom is that they are often created on the basis of the theoretical point at which students should be performing,” Bello said. “However, not acknowledging that this is not the reality we’re probably living in right now makes those tests somewhat meaningless.”

The requirements are also adding to teacher workloads in a year that has exacerbated educator burnout nationally.

More than 600 educators responded to an online survey from the Washington Teachers Union last month, and many registered similar complaints about Required Curricular Tasks.

“Obscene numbers of RCTS,” wrote one educator. “Student mental health is at an all time low, and teachers are burned out.”

“The teach-to-the-test mentality is driving me crazy,” another said. “These digital tests take so much time to set up and then they test kids’ ability to take the test rather than their knowledge.” 

“I hardly have time to grade an assessment before I begin preparing students for the next one,” a third educator wrote.

Lyons, the president of the teachers alliance, said the time would be better spent tending to the mental and emotional needs of children.

“We all need to know where our kids are. Teachers are not denying that,” she said. “They just can’t keep up with this schedule, and they’re not even sure if this is addressing the needs of their students.”

Teaching autonomy

Over the past several years, Isabella Sanchez has learned what lessons work for her fifth grade students and which do not. As an English teacher, she has rearranged lesson plans and assigned reading material that children find meaningful but are not required by the school system.

The new testing regimen interferes with that flexibility, she said, because it requires that educators stick closely to teaching plans developed by the school system.

“It takes away the teacher’s autonomy,” said Sanchez, who works at Garrison Elementary School in Shaw.

She also questions the quality of the tests, pointing to an essay question her students were expected to complete after learning about Westward Expansion earlier in the year.

The prompt directed students to “form an opinion on whether or not the placement of Native Americans onto reservations was fair” and write an essay explaining the opinion.

Sanchez felt the question did not truly assess if students could form an opinion on their own and defend it; she also believed the test should not have included the question in the first place.

“There shouldn’t be a debate about this,” she said. “I don’t ever want a kid to write that it was fair that we displaced a bunch of Native Americans.”

Magnuson, the Eaton elementary teacher, also encountered an issue with a test, citing a science question that asked students to explain why 25 grams worth of sticks would equal the same weight in ashes when burned.

In reality, Magnuson said the pile of ashes would weigh less than the sticks because of the way gasses are released.

“That’s not scientifically accurate,” she said.

She said she braced for a difficult school year, one where students would return to classrooms carrying the trauma of a pandemic. The extra responsibilities are making her job even harder.

“We’ve been given this brand new initiative that doesn’t feel very thought through in the midst of a year that we already knew would be really hard,” she said.