K-12 End-of-Year Tests Were Eliminated in 2020-21, but Will They Ever Come Back?

Writing in November 2020, Craig Jones argued that formative assessment, such as exit tickets and other classroom data, could replace high-stakes end-of-year tests. A section added below checks what actually happened to state testing after 2021 and what that means for K-12 assessment today.

In higher education, it has become increasingly clear that colleges and universities are on a path to remove all ACT and SAT requirements. As of today, only one Ivy League school, Princeton, is still requiring admissions tests (although this year, they are not requiring submissions due to lack of access to testing sites).

Testing in K12

Within K-12, the future of high stakes, end-of-year testing has been a far more controversial topic. Schools across the country have become accustomed to taking tests and repeatedly exposing our nation’s opportunity gap. Idealistically, the system was designed to measure learning and to keep children from falling through the cracks. In reality, the system often ties funding to test results and treats students like widgets in a factory. The system was clearly designed for school district administrators and/or government reporting and not for the students themselves. As evidence, if the students even find out their own results, it is almost never with any context or support for how to address their areas of need. These tests have been the foundation of a system that is not demonstrating growth.

Many articles are written about the unbelievable failures of end-of-year assessment. Whether it be teaching to the test, testing anxiety, or bias against minority groups, the system is flawed. Yet we keep testing.

Last school year, due to COVID-19, the federal standardized exam requirements were waived across the US. This year, testing is somewhat uncertain, but the major players have opened their systems for virtual interim assessments, which often function as practice for the larger test. With the kick from COVID-19 and the rapid transition of technology within every classroom, we finally may have found the inflection point that may kill end-of-year tests once and for all.

Formative Assessment Altered the Paradigm

Since the early 1970s, the concept of Formative Assessment has been taught to educators. This concept focuses on teachers using data in their classrooms to help students grow. It has since been popularized to distinguish “Assessment for Learning” as opposed to the “Assessment of Learning.” The distinction is enormous, as the purpose is no longer for administrators and governmental agencies and instead dramatically shifted the classroom back to teachers. Teachers use data to gain extreme insight into the learning of their students. However, the data isn’t always immediately available to the student. The standards-aligned insights of Do Nows, Exit Tickets, and the myriad of other formative assessment practices often still have only moderate transparency for the student.

The future is now, but in order to eliminate End-of-Year Assessment, every stakeholder must benefit

I once took a picture of a very old poster on a cubicle within the Los Angeles Unified School District that described the future of education. Regarding Assessment and Evaluation, it read, “Technology-based applications will provide individualized and continuous feedback to students based on frequent, formative assessment. Teachers will have more immediate and accurate feedback on student performance, too, allowing them to adapt instruction as necessary. Online assessments also facilitate the rapid transfer of data to other levels of the education system. By providing better feedback on student performance, programs and policies  can be reviewed more thoroughly to determine what might constrain or enable school innovation.”

The idea of valid, standards-aligned data on learning being immediately available for all educational stakeholders has long been the Holy Grail for everyone within a school: administrators, teachers, students (and their parents). Few people thought summative assessments would go down without a crusade — and formative assessment hasn’t yet benefited administrators enough to measure performance for governmental requirements that ensure no student falls through the cracks.

Yet, without warning, two tidal forces have changed everything: extreme technological innovation and COVID-19.

It is now possible to have teachers utilize new forms of formative instruction that capture millions of data points on each student’s learning — and the data is not primarily benefiting only the teacher anymore. It is now possible for administrators to see significantly more standards-aligned data without having to turn schools into factories for high-stakes assessment. Most dramatically, it is now possible for students (and their parents) to have complete visibility into their own learning in ways that make the students themselves primary beneficiaries of all this data on student learning.

With No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act and Common Core; shifts were made to utilize data as a means to understand student learning and progress was made to expose a widening opportunity gap in this country; however, the foundational reliance on collecting data at the end of the year has never been a solution for learning.

While federal laws will likely re-mandate tests in the near future, COVID-19 has showed us that the future for testing is less clear. While some of this may feel like a response to a pandemic, the writing has long been on the wall for the removal of tests. High-stakes testing’s inefficiencies have made their extinction inevitable almost as soon as they began. However, to eradicate end-of-year assessment, it must not be that one party loses key data or benefits. Every educational stakeholder needs to benefit equally and there is more than enough data from the classroom as is, to make this possible. Educational technology has finally made it possible for this future to become a reality. The students (and their parents) will finally be given equal access to their data.

Teachers and administrators are beginning to find common solutions for the first time. They are beginning to collect more valid data on student learning than any end-of-year assessment could ever ascertain. Yet, the classroom has fewer elements of traditional assessment than ever before. Students no longer even need to take tests and quizzes to measure student progress. Instead, teachers only need to teach using new platforms that help extract standards-aligned data on learning from any classroom activity. The classroom is becoming more student-centered and student-paced. Playlists of learning allow for differentiation like never before, visualizing progress as students work. Like that old poster said, Formative assessment is the future. And the future is now. 

End of year tests after 2021: what actually happened and what schools use now

End of year tests did not disappear in 2020-21, and the headline above is best read as the question Craig Jones was asking in November 2020 rather than as a record of what followed. As Jones explains above, federal testing requirements had been waived in spring 2020, and the plan for the following year was uncertain. The record from early 2021 shows that the uncertainty was settled in favor of testing, with changes to how the results could be used.

What the 2021 federal guidance required

On February 22, 2021, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance saying states would be required to administer their federally required standardized assessments in 2021. The Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan policy organization, summarized that guidance in a March 2021 information request. The exams would not be required for accountability, and states could request waivers from federal accountability requirements. The testing window could be extended into summer or fall, tests could be given remotely where feasible, and the test itself could be shortened. Other flexibilities were to be considered case by case.

The same summary shows states responding in different ways. Pennsylvania passed a law allowing its education secretary to apply for a federal waiver, for example, while Michigan required districts to give a benchmark assessment to students in kindergarten through grade 8 to measure learning loss, and North Carolina required districts to give fourth graders an end-of-year diagnostic assessment to identify reading deficiencies. In other words, the federal guidance kept the tests while removing their use for accountability, and some states added their own, which is a different outcome from the elimination Jones considered. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the national sample test, was postponed in 2021 for COVID-19. According to the National Assessment Governing Board, the congressional waiver let it postpone the 2021 grade 4 and 8 reading and mathematics tests, which moved to 2022 and are now given in even-numbered years.

Why the results still matter to the end-of-year testing debate

The case for end-of-year tests rests on comparability: the same measure applied to every school lets leaders and the public see which students are being missed. The latest NAEP results show why that argument survives. In 2024, 39 percent of grade 4 students scored at or above Proficient in mathematics, up 3 points from 2022 and 2 points below 2019. In reading, 31 percent of grade 4 students reached that level, 2 points lower than in 2022. As Chalkbeat reported in May 2026, only 22 percent of 12th graders were proficient in math in 2024, and the National Assessment Governing Board voted 16-3 for a new schedule that adds state-level results for 12th grade math and reading, 8th and 12th grade civics, and 8th grade science. Interest in common measures has not faded.

Jones makes the opposing case with equal force: a score that arrives months after instruction cannot help the student who took the test, and the data rarely comes with support for the next step. Both positions are reasonable, and they answer different questions. A summative test says how a system is doing, while a formative check says what to teach tomorrow.

Exit tickets and the formative toolkit

An exit ticket is a short task, often one to three questions, that students complete in the last few minutes of a lesson so the teacher can see who understood. Jones’s argument is that tools of this kind, together with the practice of using classroom data to guide instruction, can supply better information than a single annual test. The edCircuit assessment guide and the earlier edCircuit article Crafting a New Approach to Assessment explain how these approaches work in practice.

What school leaders and teachers can decide

• Treat the two kinds of data as partners. Plan for state tests to continue, and use formative checks to improve what students know before the test window opens.
• Decide what each audience needs. Teachers need daily evidence, families need clear and timely reports of their child’s progress, and district leaders need a comparable measure across schools.
• Give students their own results with context. Jones points out that students rarely see results with support for next steps. A short conference or written plan after each unit assessment addresses that concern directly.
• Keep the load reasonable. More assessment is not better if it takes instruction time without informing teaching. Review each recurring assessment and ask what decision it supports.

The way Jones framed the question in 2020 still guides the discussion: formative data can make the classroom stronger, and whether it can replace the annual test depends on whether every group that relies on test results has a trustworthy substitute.

Further Reading

1. edCircuit – Crafting a New Approach to Assessment
2. Education Dive – State ed chiefs ponder coronavirus-era assessment challenges, solutions
3. Patch.com – On Pandemic Learning Loss, School Districts Look Forward, Not Back

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