Giving Compass' Take:

• While many school reform advocates have pushed for testing in the past to help evaluate schools, Chalkbeat reports that many seem to have had a change of heart recently.

• Test results still carry a lot of weight with philanthropies, but do reservations from educators raise valid concerns? What can we do to provide more balance to school performance metrics?

• Here's how we may be able to use student engagement as a school success indicator.

It was not the place you’d expect to hear sharp critiques of standardized testing.

But they just kept coming at an event put on by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, an organization that has spent 25 years studying and supporting key tenets of education reform.

“If there is one office in every state I would want to get rid of, it’s the accountability office,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously led a charter school in New Orleans. “I would replace that office with some kind of statewide coordination around personalized learning.” No one on the panel with him disagreed.

“I think too much time, attention, and resources have been devoted to accountability systems that don’t produce outcomes for students that historically struggled,” Lewis Ferebee, the head of Indianapolis Public Schools, said later.

“The way we’re doing [assessment] now — that is so time-, age-, grade-based — is really constraining for those innovators that are developing models that will support all kids,” said Susan Patrick of iNACOL, an organization that promotes technology-based personalized learning.

Read the full article about education reformers' worries about school testing by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.