More than a dozen states are designing, piloting, or implementing some form of through-year (or through-course) assessment as a replacement for the traditional end-of-year test that has long been used for federal accountability. Among the latest entrants are Kansas and Texas, both led by respected chiefs known for taking accountability seriously. Through-year assessment is appealing because it promises to address multiple longstanding frustrations with existing state tests. But growing enthusiasm for it rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes!
Complicating matters further, there is no single through-year blueprint. The term itself belies how varied these systems are. Instead, states are experimenting with different ways of structuring what is tested at each point in the year and how those results are used. In some states, all specified content is sampled across a series of tests and combined into a single annual determination of proficiency. In others, only portions of standards are assessed at each administration, with earlier results either fully incorporated into the final score, selectively weighted, or used primarily for informational purposes. Still other approaches rely primarily on the summative exam, with earlier tests serving mainly to support instruction rather than accountability. Policymakers and practitioners often use the same term to describe very different testing models.
Kansas’s approach, for example, is built around quarterly assessments that sample standards across the school year. Districts have some discretion as to how certain standards are incorporated into the testing sequence, but the system is designed to generate a single accountability score by aggregating performance across all four administrations. Texas, by contrast, is pursuing a program that gives districts greater flexibility over when and how certain assessments are administered, particularly at the beginning and middle of the year. Both states are trying to make state testing more useful for instruction while preserving its role in accountability. Yet for all the optimism surrounding these models, the empirical evidence on through-year assessment remains quite limited.
The more states try to have it both ways, the more they run into the tension of serving multiple, competing purposes at once. It is the same dilemma captured in the classic Saturday Night Live commercial for “New Shimmer,” a product advertised as both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Through-year assessment has something of a New Shimmer problem: It is being asked to function simultaneously as an accountability instrument and an instructional tool, as a system for comparability and a system for flexibility—design goals that do not naturally coexist in a single product.
Assessment experts have been warning about this dynamic for years. In a 2023 report, the Center for Assessment outlined ten key considerations for states pursuing through-year systems, many of which reflect the tradeoffs inherent in assessment design. More instructional utility often comes at the expense of comparability across students and schools. Additional testing windows may yield more information but increase logistical complexity. Faster feedback requires sacrifices elsewhere in the system, most commonly in the depth and breadth of what the assessment can cover.
These tradeoffs are not simply technical problems that can be papered over through more sophisticated psychometric design. They reflect a structural tension between systems built to support comparability and those designed to support instructional responsiveness. The expectation underlying many through-year proposals is that careful design choices can manage or smooth over this tension. But no matter how much ingenuity is brought to the ingredients list, a floor wax cannot be a dessert topping.
Indeed, the demands of accountability and instructional relevance pull in opposite directions. The more an assessment system is tailored to teaching and learning, the more it must reflect the diversity of classroom pacing, curriculum, and local priorities, potentially generating a wide array of tasks and measures. Accountability, on the other hand, depends on comparability across students as well as schools and districts, which requires common items or tasks aligned to a shared set of academic content expectations. Trying to make one system do too many things is a recipe for indigestion.
In theory, a summative test could be distributed across multiple administrations so that no single sitting carries the full weight of measurement. This idea is not new. It was, after all, a central motivation behind the original PARCC design. But that approach was never fully implemented, in part because states worried about unintended effects on curricular pacing and sequencing, as well as the added logistical and time demands of multiple testing windows.
That history points back to a familiar constraint rather than a new solution. The challenge, then, is not a lack of good intentions or even a lack of innovation. It is that state assessment systems are being asked to solve multiple problems at once, requiring choices that satisfy no purpose fully and inevitably sacrifice elements of each. In the process, states may be required to spend more time, money, and resources on unproven assessment models—and probably add to students’ total testing burden—at a time when there is little, if any, appetite for doing so.
Through-year assessment may yet prove valuable in some contexts. With strong leadership at the state level, Kansas and Texas are two worth watching closely. But policymakers should be wary of promises that sound too good to be true. The risk is that states mistake an unavoidable tradeoff for a design problem that can be engineered away.
