Eight Key Threats to Balanced Assessment Systems

A New Resource to be Unveiled at RILS 2025

A problem well put is half solved.
-John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry

At our annual conference next month, the Reidy Interactive Lecture Series (RILS), our focus is on what it takes to implement balanced assessment systems. We outlined the key ideas in our first blog. But before exploring ways to improve balance, we need to understand what makes those systems out of balance.

We often say that balance in assessment systems is not an on-off switch, but rather a continuum with multiple design principles (e.g., efficiency, coherence, usefulness, continuity, comprehensiveness). We need to move past binary framing to empower interest-holders to engage in incremental improvement towards more-balanced systems.

We have developed a list of what we call threats to balance, drawing on ideas presented in the National Academy of Education’s Reimagining Balanced Assessment Systems (2024) and our own experiences working with state agencies and large school districts. We grouped these eight threats under the most-relevant design principles (efficiency, usefulness and coherence). Our list of threats will be part of a larger practical guidebook that we will share in draft form at RILS and then publish with the National Academy of Education.

How Do Assessment Systems Become Unbalanced?

Threats related to efficiency are perhaps the ones that we hear about most often as students, teachers and others bemoan “too much testing.” However, just reducing the number of assessments will not result in a balanced assessment system if we don’t attend to the second category: threats to usefulness. Having a reasonable number of assessments is not the solution if they are the wrong assessments for their intended purpose.

Threats related to coherence can occur when there is a mismatch between the kinds of learning experiences that are viewed as important for students and the types of assessments used. Policies, such as requirements to grade formative assessment work or to have a high number of graded pieces of work per marking period, can hinder good assessment practice. An over-emphasis on the importance of summative assessment results can lead to a narrowing of the curriculum or a reliance only on item types that appear on the summative test.

We do not intend our list of threats to be comprehensive, but to help districts begin conversations about what might be impediments for their assessment system.

From Describing the Problem to Practical Solutions

Over the past six months, we and our Center colleagues Scott Marion and Erika Landl have been talking with state and district leaders to understand how they are working in their different spheres of influence to tackle one or more of these threats to balance. We have shared this list of threats with them for feedback. Consistently, we see heads nodding as they review the list. In our conversations, they describe steps they’ve taken to minimize one or more of these threats.

We are using what we have learned from these interviews to build on the conceptual foundations from Reimagining Balanced Assessment Systems to provide practical insights for incremental improvements, grounded in the research on the nature of student learning, formative assessment, and teacher professional learning.

On-the-Ground Work Shapes RILS 2025

Some of the state and district leaders you’ll hear from at RILS were part of the group that we interviewed. We are asking all of them to connect their presentations to our list of threats as they tell their stories of how they have been making incremental improvements towards more balanced assessment systems.  

In their NAEd chapter, Carla Evans and Erika Landl reminded us that “the primary locus of control for the design and implementation of balanced assessment systems lies with LEAs” (p. 208-209). At RILS, we highlight that district work, and also how state agencies and other organizations are supporting districts’ work on their assessment systems. For example:

• Leaders from the Katy Independent School District in Texas and the Chicago Public Schools will share two very different approaches to improving their assessment systems.
• The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, a cooperative educational service agency, and a school district will describe their partnership. The SEA collaboration with the intermediary agency has allowed for greater spread of resources and support for districts than the SEA could do on its own.
• A state agency and statewide organizations will describe how they are able to extend the capacities of SEAs and work closely with schools and districts.  

We also have a panel discussion to respond to and expand on the approaches being offered in the other sessions. The published agenda shows all of the session presenters.

Of course, in addition to great speakers, we have also designed the conference to offer plenty of opportunities for attendees to reflect on their role within the system and to learn from collaborative discussions. Transforming assessment systems requires collaboration across many interest-holders. Join us in learning and shaping these systems together!

RILS will be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on September 18-19. Click here to learn more about the conference and to register.