First a bit of history: Before he got canceled during the #Me-Too Movement, Garrison Keillor headlined a very popular public radio variety show called “A Prairie Home Companion.” Most weeks, he regaled listeners with stories from the fictional Lake Wobegon, Minnesota; I remember listening to recordings of Lake Wobegon stories on a cassette tape player in my bedroom as a 12-year-old back in the 1980s. Like I said, history!
What does this have to do with education? Let me let Checker take it from here:
It's not easy today even to recall the stir created in 1987 when an obscure West Virginia physician and his never-heard-from-before one-man advocacy organization called “Friends for Education” released a little study titled “Nationally Normed Elementary Achievement Testing in America's Public Schools: How All 50 States Are Above the National Average.” Swiftly dubbed the “Lake Wobegon report” after Garrison Keillor's mythical Minnesota hometown where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average,” it rocked the testing and education policy worlds, which were still reeling from A Nation at Risk just four years earlier.
As Education Week's Bob Rothman reported at the time, “The overwhelming majority of elementary-school pupils nationwide score above the average on normed achievement tests, results from a controversial new 50-state survey indicate.... Based on the most recent results available, 90 percent of school districts and 70 percent of students tested performed above the average on nationally normed tests, the report estimates. Those scores are inflated because testing companies set norms that are artificially low, Dr. Cannell charged. Test publishers ‘want to have good news to sell to superintendents,’ he said in an interview.”
Let me repeat that: “Test publishers ‘want to have good news to sell to superintendents.’”
Fast forward to 2025, and Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters wants to take us all back to Lake Wobegon. That’s the best way to interpret his announcement that Oklahoma will no longer implement statewide testing and instead will return to letting local superintendents pick their own off-the-shelf diagnostic tests instead.
This would be a flagrant violation of federal law, which is why he is also developing a waiver request for the Trump Administration to consider (more on that below).
Those of us who think standards, testing, and accountability are important and have done a lot of good for American kids worry that this could open the floodgates to more states backing away from statewide testing—at least if the Trump folks allow them to do so.
As decisions go, this one should be easy. Secretary McMahon: Just say no!
(So far, her team has at least said “not yet.”)
Even the staff of Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, thinks this idea is “short sighted.”
Plus, it would be an enormous gift to the teachers unions, who have been trying to kill statewide standardized testing—and results-driven accountability—forever. Which makes it all the more ironic that Superintendent Walters claims that testing is a “teachers-union approach.” Yeah, right.
There are plenty of other reasons that this would be huge setback:
- As in the 1980s, letting districts choose their own adventure when it comes to testing would allow them to hire vendors that make them look better than they really are. That’s a good deal for superintendents, teachers unions, and other parts of the education establishment, but a raw deal for kids and parents, who will be told that all is well even if they are far from on track for success, and will lose the ability to compare schools to one another.
- Diagnostic (and “norm-referenced”) tests have several important purposes, but they aren’t necessarily aligned to state standards—what all students in a state are expected to know and be able to do to be successful in the job market and engaged in our democracy. Especially if tests don’t go through “peer review”—the main mission of which is to ensure alignment with standards—than ditching statewide tests amounts to ditching state standards, too. That turns back the clock at least thirty years! Yet waiving peer review is among the items that Walters is requesting.
- A key reason we need statewide tests, rather than a district-by-district patchwork, is to ensure that all students in a given state are held to the same high standards. Otherwise, we’ll return to a time when kids in the affluent suburbs were expected to meet challenging standards that prepared them for top-tier colleges—and kids in low-income rural and urban areas were told to make dioramas all day.
Superintendent Walters has a history of making splashy (and questionable) announcements that end up going nowhere. Nowhere—rather than back to the 1980s—is the right place for his testing idea to go, too.
