House subcommittee narrowly advances legislation to reduce testing for high school students

Stock photo of a multiple choice test

Members of the House K-12 Subcommittee voted 4 to 3 Tuesday morning to advance a second bill that’s designed to reduce testing for high school students.

Last week the subcommittee advanced legislation amended by subcommittee chairman Representative Kirk Haston’s, D-Lobelville, to replace most of the end-of-course (EOC) exams high school students take with the ACT test.

Haston returned this week with a narrower bill that could end up replacing the earlier legislation.

Currently high school students take EOC assessments in English I and II; Algebra I, II, and Geometry or Integrated Math I, II, and III; along with U.S. History and Biology. Studies have found these EOC’s have played a valuable role in helping improve student performance.

State Representative Kirk Haston (Photo by the Tennessee General Assembly)

Haston’s legislation would remove every EOC but science and instead require students to take the pre-ACT in ninth and tenth-grade, the ACT their junior year, and the ACT retake their senior year. Students would continue to take the science EOC under the legislation as the ACT test is phasing that subject out.

Representative Haston says the change is needed because Tennessee has seen its average ACT test score drop by 1.4 points since 2018.

“We’re all for accountability and we’re all for data, but we need to tie it to the data that matters and tie it to an exam that connects students directly to scholarships and directly to postsecondary opportunities,” said Haston. “I think that we’ve tried the way that we’re currently under and I think that our declining ACT scores show that it has not been working.”

House Education Chair Mark White joined Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee in opposing Haston’s bill.  White said the EOCs are too important to remove because they’re the only tests that directly align with more stringent college and career ready standards Tennessee adopted more than a decade ago to better align with national standards.

“The end-of-course is really a final exam,” said White. “My concern if you remove the end-of-course test, or the final exam, there’s really no other way we know that the student is achieving that information. The ACT is a great test, but it’s not based upon Tennessee standards. So, if we quit testing based upon Tennessee standards, what does that mean?”

Committee members failed to pass a second bill sponsored by Representative Haston on a 4 to 4 vote that also mirrors components of the legislation that advanced in the subcommittee last week. It would have allowed career and technical education (CTE) focused students to substitute CTE classes for Algebra II, chemistry and foreign language.