Testing, Testing (and our 123s) 

It’s safe to say that no kid at school looks forward to standardized test day.  

Some even make themselves dizzy or faint, or steal the exam from their teacher. (My quick note is that showing “practical knowledge” and casting the pall of your presence in the same classroom for yet another school year if you don’t receive a passing grade might work better.)  

Most of us are also familiar with the high stakes that come with taking the SAT and the ACT among students who want to secure admission to the most selective colleges. The test prep industry overall is worth over $500 million, with more growth projected. Clearly, testing plays a major role in K-12 education, especially for everyone who started school during the new millennium after No Child Left Behind was signed into law.  

What’s the relevance for school choice? 

One of the most frequent arguments made against expanding school choice is an imagined lack of accountability. In fact, I wrote earlier this year about how education savings account programs (ESAs) are, in the main, filled with guardrails. Along with fiscal accountability, some choice advocates (and many choice opponents) tend to want program participants to take exams every school year. It’s not 100% clear what testing advocates want to do next. Do they want to use the results to inform parents? That wouldn’t be objectionable, but some might have ambitions beyond that. If, say, they wished to create a new evaluation system (No Child Left Behind-style) of identifying and sanctioning schools with poor test scores, that’s quite different. Of course, EdChoice diligently monitors the highest quality evaluations of choice programs, and in our most recent version find that around 60% of the studies included found positive effects on test scores for participating students, and even more found positive results for students who remain in public schools. And this is before we look at other outcome variables, almost all of which trend positively. 

Below is a map that shows which kinds of tests are required for ESA programs, by state. 

As you can see, the majority of ESA states require some testing — only four do not. Most of the ones that do require testing allow for the nationally norm-referenced test or the state test, with four exceptions. Also, most of the programs allow for a waiver, typically for a participant who has special needs.  

The issue of testing and school choice is complicated. I think that looking at average performance can obscure differential impacts. A small average decrease among a large sample of students, for example, will almost certainly include a fair share of students who did in fact increase their scores. A program might work for some students and not others, all of which is lost if you only look at aggregate averages. Consider also that a school of choice may be taking different pedagogical approaches than a traditional public school, and so using the same measuring stick would tell you how aligned instruction is to what is tested, instead of what students are really learning. 

A third reason is that, for many first-time choice beneficiaries, the family’s highest priority for pursuing school choice was to get their child out of a dangerous situation at their residentially zoned public school. It’s why we continually see “safety” as one of the most common responses if not the most common, when we survey parents who switched schools (see pages 9 and 10 of our June 2026 Schooling in America report).  

A fourth reason is that “nationally norm-referenced test” often includes a number of different tests. Take a look at how many different assessments satisfy the testing mandate for participating in Florida’s school choice programs: 28! The abundance of schooling options in leader-of-the-pack states like Florida is clearly a good thing for families. It can also mean that two children the same age and grade in the school attending two different private schools in the same area may take different assessments year-to-year, whose results wouldn’t definitively answer the question of which student “learned more.” A test that is designed to measure how many students hit a proficiency target is different from a test trying to identify a teacher’s individual contribution to student learning is different from a test that is trying to tell parents how their child compares to a nationally-representative sample of their peers.  

All of these rebuttals should cast a strict testing regime for school choice into grave doubt.