Students can’t skip another year of standardized testing.

The U.S. Department of Education made that announcement Monday.

Federal leaders said it’s not to measure the school’s accountability, but the impact COVID-19 has had on education. It’s a change many educators don’t support.

“These tests don’t exactly give us any real-time data,” said Nicole Capsello, the Syracuse Teachers Association first vice president. “It’s not results that we can typically use to inform our teaching. That coupled with we’ve been in a pandemic, and we know that there’s huge inequities across all districts.”

Capsello said the school district already has its own quarterly assessment that would be more useful.

“We’re able to turn around and use that data to inform our teaching,” said Capsello. “Those are the things we should be focusing on, and if they want data, why can’t we just submit that data to them.”

Another concern is test distribution and fairness.

“We don’t even have 50 percent of our students coming in person at this point,” said Capsello. “We’re doing a lot of virtual learning and as we saw last year, the state doesn’t really have the capacity to do online testing.”

“I think we all in the school business are really struggling with is the fact that we have so many different scenarios for student learning,” said Mark Potter, the Liverpool Central School District superintendent. “Not every sub group of student is really receiving the same quality of education just simply because of the parameters.”

However, Potter believes the students’ performance needs to be evaluated in some form. To provide some flexibility, federal leaders say the tests can be shorter, given remotely or delayed until the fall. 

“I’m not sure how beneficial that will be because performance assessment only gives you a moment in time,” said Potter.

Potter said the Board of Regents will meet next month to discuss reducing the number of exams for high school students. Either way, he says they’re prepared to take the tests digitally.

Meanwhile, Capsello says the state and national teacher unions are working with the federal government to find another solution.