WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Saturday called for capping standardized testing at 2 percent of classroom time and said the government shares responsibility for turning tests into the focus of American schools.
Students spend about 20 to 25 hours per school year taking standardized tests, according to a study of the nation's 66 largest school districts that was released Saturday by the Council of the Great City Schools. It did not count quizzes or tests created by classroom teachers.
It's also not known how much class time students spend preparing for tests that became mandatory under the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind law and are now a flash point in the debate over the Common Core academic standards.
"Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble," Obama said in a video released on Facebook. "So we're going to work with states, school districts, teachers and parents to make sure that we're not obsessing about testing."
Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan plan to hold an Oval Office meeting Monday with teachers and school officials working to reduce testing time.
"I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support," said Duncan, who will leave office in December. "But I can't tell you how many conversations I'm in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction.
"It's important that we're all honest with ourselves. At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation. We can and will work with states, districts and educators to help solve it."
Between pre-K and 12th grade, students take about 112 standardized exams, according to the council report. It said testing amounts to 2.3 percent of classroom time for the average eighth-grader. By contrast, most countries that outperform the U.S. on international exams test students three times during their school careers.
"How much constitutes too much time is really difficult to answer," said Michael Casserly, the council's executive director.
The heaviest testing load falls on the nation's eighth-graders, who spend an average of 25.3 hours during the school year taking standardized tests. Testing affects even the youngest students, with the average pre-K class giving 4.1 standardized tests, the report found.
Obama cannot force states or districts to limit the tests, which have drawn criticism from parents and teachers. But he directed the Education Department to make it easier for states to satisfy federal testing mandates, and he urged states and districts to use factors beyond testing to assess student performance.
The Obama administration said it still supports standardized tests as a necessary assessment tool, and there are no signs they are going away soon.
Both the House and Senate versions of an update to No Child Left Behind would preserve annual reading and math exams, though the House version would diminish their significance in determining whether schools are up to par. The legislation is in limbo while House and Senate negotiators figure out how to reconcile the competing versions.
Administration officials said that in many cases, testing is redundant, poorly aligned with curriculum or simply overkill. They said the administration supports legislative proposals to cap testing time on a federal level, but it wants to offer states a model for how to cut down on testing absent congressional action.
"There's just a lot of testing going on, and it's not always terribly useful," Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White House's Domestic Policy Council, said. "In the worst case, it can sap the joy and fun out of the classroom for students and for teachers."
Casserly said his group found examples of testing redundancy that could be cut to create more instructional time. For example, some states and school districts were requiring both end-of-year tests and end-of-course tests in the same subjects in the same grade.
"Everyone is culpable here," Casserly said. "You've got multiple actors requiring, urging and encouraging a variety of tests for very different reasons that don't necessarily add up to a clear picture of how our kids are doing. The result is an assessment system that's not very intelligent and not coherent."
Even testing supporters agree about an overload.
"For those of us who support annual assessments, it doesn't mean we support this craziness," said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, an advocacy group focused on reducing the achievement gap. "There's a clear problem here."
To ease the testing burden, the administration will provide states with guidance about how they can satisfy federal testing requirements in less time or in more creative ways, including federal waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act that the Education Department readily has handed out. For example, some eighth-graders who take high school-level coursework currently take both eighth grade and high school assessments, but the administration will allow them to opt out of the eighth-grade tests.
In one of the most notable attempts to reduce testing, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade County district in Florida, earlier this year cut the number of district-created end-of-course exams from 300 to 10 and eliminated them entirely for elementary schools.
"I believe in accountability," said Carvalho, who runs the country's fourth-largest school district. "But fewer assessments of higher quality are better. What we have now across the country is confusing, hard to navigate and, I believe, abusive of both teacher and student time."
California eliminated its high school graduation test three weeks ago, joining Minnesota, Mississippi, Alaska, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Virginia has reduced its number of state-level tests, and Montgomery County, Md., last month put an end to its high school final exams.
The value of standardized tests taps into the national debate about the federal government's role in schools; both political parties generally support scaling back Washington's reach.
Central to that debate is Common Core, a set of academic standards in reading and math developed by state education officials. The federal government doesn't require Common Core, but the administration has backed it with financial incentives. About 12 million students in the spring took tests based on the curriculum.
Teachers unions have fought hard against one-size-fits-all tests for students being tied to teachers' performance evaluations.
Among other findings in the council report, four in 10 districts report having to wait between two months and four months before getting state test results.
And some pockets of the country had substantial numbers of students opting out of standardized tests. But the overall opt-out rate was usually less than 1 percent.
Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman and Jennifer C. Kerr of The Associated Press; by Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post; and by Kate Zernike of The New York Times.
A Section on 10/25/2015