A lot of civil rights and education organizations demanded a commitment from the Biden administration to maintain yearly state testing in K-12 schools and wanted details of its plan to use test results to target federal assistance to the most vulnerable kids and those furthest behind coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A letter by civil rights and education organizations to Cardona builds on activists’ efforts to ward off attacks on standardized testing. Such attacks were growing before the COVID-19 pandemic but grew even more as it became clear that the tests would do little to assess children who had been locked out of in-person education due to increased COVID-19 transmission rates in their communities – most of whom were Hispanic, Black, and Asian students, students with disabilities, and low-income group students.