A New Approach to Assessment for Today’s Classrooms

Why volatility changes how we must think about testing — and why abandoning assessment would be the wrong response.

There is a growing temptation right now to treat large-scale testing as optional.

Across the education landscape, leaders are navigating a wave of changes:

• Districts are reconsidering one-to-one devices because of screen-time concerns.
• EdTech companies are accelerating AI integration to gauge student learning.
• State budgets are tightening under lower-than-projected revenue and rising personnel costs.
• US Department of Education dismantling has called into question all federal mandates.

These shifts are visible and widely discussed within the industry.

Meanwhile, something more structurally important is happening inside our schools.

Students are not as consistently present as they were before COVID.

The Stability Assumption Is Breaking Down

The stability assumption reflects a basic premise of large-scale assessment: that the learning environments surrounding students remain relatively consistent, such that test results can meaningfully inform how we understand student progress over time.

This assumption has become harder and harder to sustain in recent years at every level. In the state of California, chronic absenteeism remains significantly elevated compared to its pre-pandemic levels, and recovery has begun to slow.¹ A report from the EdPolicy Institute of California documents persistent disparities and uneven improvement across districts. Attendance instability is not a short-term blip as we had once hoped; instead it is increasingly becoming structurally embedded in many communities.

California is not unique in this pattern. Similar attendance challenges are emerging across many states, making this a national consideration rather than a regional one.

This chronic absenteeism is compounded further by increasing school mobility. Expanded school choice environments create more mid-year transfers. The 74 has reported that while choice can expand opportunity, the churn it enables carries measurable academic costs, especially for students already facing disadvantage.² Mobility interrupts instructional continuity. It complicates peer relationships. It disrupts curriculum sequencing.

Homeschooling is also growing, and it is no longer confined to rural, conservative communities. Education Next notes that homeschooling growth includes urban families and racially diverse communities, driven by varied motivations including flexibility, dissatisfaction, and customization.³

Add to that more flexible attendance norms post-COVID, increased virtual and hybrid options and staffing shortages affecting instructional consistency.

And you have a system operating under volatility rather than stability.

Here’s the issue: Modern assessment systems were designed assuming relatively stable cohorts and instructional continuity.

That assumption is weakening in 2026.

What Volatility Means for Measurement

• Longitudinal comparisons assume comparable instructional exposure.
• Growth models assume reasonably stable enrollment patterns.
• Year-over-year trend lines assume consistent opportunity to learn.

When instructional time varies significantly across students, observed score variation reflects a mixture of factors such as true differences in learning, instructional exposure, attendance, and school mobility.

This is not a flaw in measurement design. It is a contextual condition.

Good psychometric practice requires acknowledging contextual conditions when interpreting results. The appropriate response to interpretive complexity is not to remove the instrument (AKA tests), instead the appropriate response is to improve communication about what the instrument can, and cannot, tell us under current conditions.

Why Eliminating Assessment Would Worsen the Problem

In periods of volatility, transparency in measurement becomes more important than ever.

When student experiences vary widely across classrooms, schools, and districts, education leaders need reliable ways to understand what is actually happening across the system.

Without statewide assessment systems, several important signals become much harder to detect:

• Attendance-driven learning gaps become harder to quantify.
• Mobility-related disruptions become anecdotal rather than measurable.
• Conversations about equal access lose a shared empirical reference point.
• Families lose comparable information across schools and options.

Public education is a public good. Public goods require shared visibility.

Statewide assessment is one of the few pieces of infrastructure that provides comparable, cross-system information about how students are learning.

That comparability becomes particularly important as families explore an expanding range of educational options, including charters, private schools, microschools, online programs, and homeschooling. When families are making decisions across different school environments, comparable information helps them understand how students in those settings are performing relative to broader system benchmarks.

Choice without transparency tends to benefit those who already possess information advantages.

Statewide assessment systems help reduce that information gap by creating a common reference point across the education system within a state. Teachers can see how their students are progressing relative to broader learning expectations. School leaders can identify patterns across classrooms and programs. District leaders can detect where additional support may be needed. State leaders can monitor system-wide trends.

Families benefit from that same shared visibility. When comparing schools or educational options, statewide results provide one of the few consistent signals available across very different learning environments.

Improving assessment strengthens access to shared information across the system. Eliminating assessment reduces that visibility.

That is not an ideological claim. It is a structural one.

Volatility does not mean assessment has outlived its usefulness. It means we must become more thoughtful about how we interpret and communicate what assessment results represent. When learning environments become less predictable, the need for shared signals about how students are progressing becomes more important, not less. .

Statewide assessments were never meant to explain everything happening inside a classroom, but they remain one of the few tools that help us see patterns across an entire education system. In a period defined by mobility, attendance variability, and expanding educational options, abandoning assessment would not reduce uncertainty. It would simply leave us navigating that uncertainty without a compass.

This is exactly why the Compassionate Assessment Framework exists. Compassionate Assessment does not ignore the complexity students face; it acknowledges it. By grounding assessment systems in strong technical quality, thoughtful interpretation, human-centered communication, and supportive environments, we can ensure that measurement continues to serve learning even in volatile times. The goal is not more testing or less testing. The goal is assessment that helps the entire system make better decisions for students.

Education Next. (2024). What State Policymakers Should Know About Homeschoolers. https://www.educationnext.org/what-state-policymakers-should-know-about-homeschoolers-misconceptions-who-chooses-home-education/

EdPolicy Institute of California. (2025). Unpacking California’s Chronic Absence Crisis Through 2024–25. https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/unpacking-californias-chronic-absence-crisis-through-2024-25

The 74. (2024). School Choice Is Great. But the Churn It Allows Comes at a Cost. https://www.the74million.org/article/school-choice-is-great-but-the-churn-it-allows-comes-at-a-cost/