Why Are States So Slow to Release Test Scores?

More than five months after students took their spring state tests, nearly a dozen states still have not publicly released the baseline results, according to an Education Week review of states’ websites.

The list includes both populous states like California alongside much smaller ones, like South Dakota and Maine.

The glacial pace of score releases isn’t an aberration. It’s on par with the 2023 timeline, according to a separate tally by education analyst Chad Aldeman. But the data come as a series of recent reports have pointed to significant weaknesses in the testing-and-accountability structure that form the heart of federal K-12 policy.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education found last month that states make it very difficult to compare score growth over time. The Education Trust concluded in a recent report that most states don’t consider how scores of subgroups of students, like English learners, factor into school ratings, while the Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s watchdog arm, found widespread lapses in how states and districts support schools needing improvement.

It all begs the question: Two decades after it became federal law to test annually—and as computerized testing has become widespread—why is this still taking so long?

“I don’t know why every media outlet in the country isn’t outraged. It’s insane to me,” said Paige Kowalski, the executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a group that advocates for the smart use of data in education, about the long timeframe. “You routinely see certain states wait all the way until December. This is intentional. It isn’t accidental, and it’s not a lack of resources, and it’s insulting.”

Which states still haven’t released their test scores?

Federal law requires states’ testing programs to provide “coherent and timely information” about students’ mastery of standards, but the U.S. Department of Education has never issued guidance about a specific timeline.

EdWeek’s review found that 10 states still do not appear to have publicly released statewide results by Oct. 4: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.

(EdWeek counted states that have publicly issued preliminary test results, as in New Mexico, New York, and Vermont, among those that have released scores, though final results could change. We did not count states where preliminary results have been issued only to school districts.)

Officials in some of those states offered a variety of explanations for the long timeline, generally citing the scope and complexity of the task and of preparing public-facing reports.

“There is much to do to prepare for the scoring and reporting of over 20 million tests that are taken by over 4 million students,” Scott Roark, a spokesperson for the California department of education, said in an email, adding that the state’s window for administering tests did not close until the end of June. The state plans to release scores Oct. 15.

Nebraska doesn’t expect to release its scores until the end of November.

“It’s just a matter of taking time,” said David Jespersen, a spokesperson for the Nebraska education department. The state receives results from vendors in August, he said, after which they go through formatting and verification. It’s been working with vendors to try to move the timeline up.

In 2018, Nebraska’s results were released Dec. 21; last year, it was Nov. 22.

“If we could get it all done earlier, I think there is a value to having it out earlier,” Jespersen said. “You have the state-level comparison, and district-by-district comparison, so people can see where they are statewide and with similar districts.”

Pennsylvania officials plan to release results in early November, said education department spokesperson Erin James. The state’s tests contain many hand-scored items, like essay questions, that take longer to score. And the state still administers a “significant” number of paper-and-pencil, rather than online, tests, James said.

The technical steps in putting out test scores

In general, states administer their exams in April and May, said Chris Domaleski, the associate director of the Center for Assessment, which advises states on their testing systems. In May and June, they conduct the technical and quality-control work of scoring tests and cleaning up the data, and they should be able to push results out by late June or early July. States also often wait to have districts review scores and develop a communication plan before they actually release scores publicly.

But by October, he said, most states should be able to make scores widely available, unless there is some technical challenge.

Those do exist. Arkansas changed its tests this past year, which means new cutoff scores—the scores that determine when a student has reached “proficiency”—have to be set, which takes several meetings involving both technical experts and educators. Last year, Arkansas published school report cards in September; the state plans to release scores in October this year.

“Educators will still have plenty of time to review the scores and make decisions that best meet the learning needs of students,” said Kimberly Mundell, a spokesperson for the Arkansas education department.

Officials in California, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania all noted that schools can request access to the data before it’s made widely available to plan for the school year and flag any corrections.

Domaleski feels states’ timelines have generally improved over the past two decades, but acknowledged timeliness is critical.

“I’d say, take the time you need but no more than you require,” he said. “I think people have a responsibility not to delay [the scores] more than is necessary.”

One state now requires quicker release of test scores to parents

EdWeek’s tally didn’t consider how accessible or useful states’ score displays were, but that is another area in which they often fall short.

After facing widespread ridicule for pushing back its timeline for releasing test scores, Oregon posted them Oct. 3. The Oregonian/Oregon Live media outlet used the data to make its own interactive display because the state’s was so poor.

“Finding your school’s results on the Oregon Department of Education’s website is extremely challenging,” its reporters wrote, “requiring locating and downloading at least six Excel spreadsheets to see the school’s results in both English and math over multiple years.”

Kowalski of the Data Quality Campaign says her biggest complaint is that parents are often the last to get access to the scores. Like the children’s game of “telephone,” states usually distribute first to districts and then let districts hand off the results to schools. Parents, she said, are at the bottom of the list.

“You can still give a parent a child’s test score and say, we’re still working on accountability stuff for the school. But for a parent to get something in December that happened last April—what are we doing?” she said.

One state recently sped up the timeline for parents.

For about a decade, Ohio has had a law on the books requiring the state to issue school report cards, which are largely based on the test scores, by Sept. 15. In 2023, a new requirement added to a budget bill required the state to give parents access to their own children’s scores by June 30. Although it’s not clear what prompted the change, advocacy and parent pressure likely played a role, said Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank and advocacy organization.

“There was a lot of understanding that students had lost ground during the pandemic, and parents have info to make decisions for their own kids and whether it requires summer school,” he said.

Only a handful of states appear to have taken similar steps. In January, lawmakers in Virginia proposed requiring students’ individualized test scores to be made available within 45 days after testing windows closed, but the bill failed to advance.

Is there a way to encourage states to speed up test score results?

A broad-based solution may be more complex than legislative tweaks.

A major problem, Kowalski said, is that the same agencies that oversee the release of the test scores—state education departments—have little to gain from quick releases if the results show declines.

“Do we have a fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem, where we’re asking leaders to do something against their own interest?” she said. “It takes a lot of political courage, and I think we’re over-relying on courage and under-relying on fixing the incentive structure.”

Kentucky, she pointed out, has long had an independent body, the Kentucky Center for Statistics, whose sole job is to collect and disseminate state data, but is not in charge of policy. Such a system could be used in testing, too, in which an independent body administers the state tests and reports them out, minimizing the incentive to slow-walk scores, she said.

Ultimately, she said, the lack of transparency undermines trust in public schools.

“We’ve never gotten the incentives right about data. The answer isn’t to stop testing, it’s to understand how our schools and students are performing, and how we help parents and teachers understand that, and get it out to the public so we can feel good about our public schools again,” Kowalski said. “We just have not been innovative or creative in trying to solve this problem.”