A version of the following commentary appeared in the Springfield News-Leader.
In what is becoming an unfortunate annual tradition, statewide student testing is once again under attack in Jefferson City. This year, two bills—House Bill 1704 and Senate Bill 992—would significantly weaken our statewide testing system. If enacted, they would undermine the most important tool we have for measuring student learning.
Both bills take the same basic approach: they allow school districts to opt out of Missouri’s statewide assessment and instead choose their own tests. Under HB 1704, districts would be granted extraordinary discretion, including the ability to design their own assessments from scratch. This is a terrible idea for two fundamental reasons.
First, some lawmakers are under the mistaken impression that the Missouri state test—the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP)—is not a high-quality test. It is. It was developed by a professional testing firm with decades of experience (Data Recognition Corporation), and there is compelling external evidence that MAP test scores predict important long-run outcomes.
For example, a 2025 article published in Education Next shows that just 1.5 percent of students who score Below Basic in reading on the 8th-grade MAP go on to earn a four-year college degree, compared with 22.3 percent of students who score Proficient and 44.5 percent of students who score Advanced. This kind of predictive power is no accident. It reflects a test that captures core academic skills tied to long-run success.
Developing a reliable, valid assessment is expensive and technically demanding. Collectively, we (i.e., the 50 U.S. states) spend over a billion dollars each year to build, administer, score, and improve these exams. Testing companies operate in a competitive national market, which gives them strong incentives to continually invest in and improve their products.
By contrast, no individual school district has the expertise or resources to replicate that quality. Writing a good test is not like writing a worksheet. Poorly designed assessments produce noisy, misleading results that tell parents and policymakers little about what students actually know.
The second problem with these bills is that they reflect a failure to understand that accountability requires comparability. If we want to know how schools are performing, students in the same grade and subject need to take the same test. Scores across tests are not readily comparable. Once districts are allowed to pick and choose their own exams, statewide accountability effectively collapses.
It is also important to recognize that by allowing school districts to choose their own tests, these bills would implicitly work against Governor Kehoe’s recent executive order to produce letter grades for Missouri schools. The new executive order has the potential to finally give parents clear, accessible information about school performance. Similar information is already available in other states where students do better on national tests, and requiring letter grades is a much-needed change in Missouri. But school letter grades will only be as informative as the information on which they are based—if they are based on low-quality tests, or tests that are not directly comparable across districts, the resulting grades will be less accurate and easier to game.
The politics of the assault on testing in Missouri—and nationally—are interesting. Historically, opposition to state testing has come from the political left, a stance often tied to close alignment with teacher unions that resist school accountability. But these new attacks are coming from the right. The impetus seems to be rooted in distrust of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, or perhaps skepticism of state oversight more generally.
The skepticism is understandable, but targeting statewide testing is misguided. Assessment is one area where a centralized, well-resourced state agency can clearly outperform individual school districts. A reduced state role in education does not require abandoning the state’s ability to measure student learning reliably and consistently.
If you are among the many Missourians dissatisfied with how our schools are performing, I share your frustration. On national exams, several nearby states are running circles around Missouri because they have adopted stronger policies. Our continued underperformance is a serious disservice to our children. But if you think things are bad now, wait until we get rid of state testing. Eliminating consistent, high-quality assessments will not fix Missouri’s schools—it will only make failure easier to ignore.
