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The districts must report results publicly in school board meetings. While many districts already gave assessments throughout the school year, the new rules will require many, including 4J and Springfield, to switch testing platforms.
Lane County students may experience new and different ways of testing this fall as a new state law takes effect.
Districts are working to comply with the 2025 Education Accountability Act, also known as Senate Bill 141, starting this school year. What that means for students will depend on the district.
The law requires schools to report on and work toward goals for 2030 in eight different areas, including attendance, language arts, math and graduation rates. It also requires districts to test students in kindergarten through eighth grade in math and language arts three times a year and report results publicly to their school boards.
While many districts, including Eugene School District 4J and Springfield Public Schools, already give standardized interim assessments to measure progress throughout the year, the new law requires districts to choose from four test brands, all of which are computer-based and adapt each question based on the student’s performance throughout the test (a technology known as computer-adaptive testing).
Local district officials see the new interim assessment requirements mainly as positive, despite the work it will take to train staff on new platforms. But the new requirements also create questions, such as how to share the data with the public without putting too much pressure on results. Some school officials, however, think transparency is necessary for forward progress.
“If there’s gaps in student learning, we need our family and community as partners to be able to address that,” Bethel School District Superintendent Kraig Sproles said. “I think we need to move away from this notion that shared accountability is negative. It’s not.”
New style of testing, same goal
School administrators compare interim assessments to temperature or blood pressure checks at the doctor’s office — routine and quick, but essential to seeing which students need more help and what to do to help them.
“If a person has blood pressure that’s out of a normal range, no one’s calling an ambulance or going crazy,” Springfield Assistant Superintendent Brian Megert said. “They just think about, ‘What is the proper next step to take when blood pressure is out of the normal range?’”
The Bethel and 4J districts will use new interim testing platforms to meet the new standards, and students will begin seeing the new tests this fall. The tests take at most 30 to 40 minutes to complete, and data is immediately available for teachers to use, unlike the results of the end-of-year state standardized test.
For Bethel students, interim testing will be new. Bethel teachers regularly use other progress-marking assessments, but haven’t adopted the use of interim assessments until this year. Bethel is spending about $60,000 to use Renaissance STAR reading and math assessments this year for students in grades 3-10, with about $33,600 covered by one-time state funds meant to help districts establish interim assessment platforms.
For 4J students, three-times-a-year interim testing is routine, but the test itself will be different this year. In the past the district has used a test developed by University of Oregon researchers called easyCBM as their interim assessment. The district is spending about $98,800 to use state-approved Renaissance Star reading and math assessments for grades K-9 this year, with about $96,000 paid for with one-time state funds. The district estimates it will spend $88,000 to $89,000 annually for the platform.
Courtney Leonard, 4J’s secondary curriculum coordinator, and Erin Gaston, 4J elementary curriculum coordinator, are excited about the new features of computer adaptive testing. It will help teachers better understand students’ learning progress, especially students at the high and low ends of achievement.
“It will let us know how they’re doing compared to their peers, against national norms,” Gaston said. “So it gives us, I think, a better sense of where they are rather than, ‘Yes, you can pass a third grade test’ or ‘No, you can’t.’”
She said more nuanced data will reduce the amount of diagnostic follow-up testing teachers currently have to do to pinpoint the concepts students are struggling to grasp, cutting down on additional testing time. Renaissance Star also offers native-level Spanish language versions of their assessments, Leonard said, which will better help the district serve English-language learners.
Gaston wants parents to be aware of the switch to computer-based testing, because students who find interim assessments easy will be more challenged. The test automatically gets harder if a student is answering questions correctly, meaning students will eventually get answers wrong.
The Springfield district already uses an interim math assessment that is on the state’s list and has a waiver from the state to wait to implement new reading assessments until next fall. This means Springfield students will see no changes this fall. Like 4J, Springfield has already been doing three-times-per-year interim testing for reading and math, using easyCBM for reading and iReady for math.
Differing views
Sproles has strong opinions about the future of interim testing in Oregon.
Instead of having four approved test options for districts to choose from, Sproles wants interim assessments in Oregon to be uniform. Then, the assessments could better measure the state’s academic achievement, Sproles said — something he doesn’t see the annual state test doing well, mainly due to the fact that students can opt out. In Sproles’ opinion, Oregon’s high opt-out rates make it hard to measure how districts are actually doing, and significantly fewer parents opt out of interim assessments.
Megert, on the other hand, wished administrators had more choices than the four test brands approved by the state.
“I think we should have as many choices as possible,” he said.
Districts haven’t quite ironed out how they will present interim assessment results in public meetings, one of the state’s new requirements. Gaston said 4J will likely present data by grade-level, with no school, teacher or student identifying information included. Megert wants board members to fully understand the purpose of interim assessments and how they’re used by educators, and then find out how to share data in a way that’s useful for the board.
Megert said there’s a risk that by sharing the data publicly, interim assessments will become more high-stakes for teachers and students, which is not the aim of interim assessments.
“The intended use is that we’re making data-based decisions for teaching and learning,” Megart said. “So that’s a risk, but I’m not overly concerned about that because I think we have the obligation to share with the board and partner with the board on how our students are learning in our schools.”
