Colorado is Slashing Standardized Testing: What Parents & Businesses Need to Know

The Bottom Line

This bill aims to drastically cut back the amount of time Colorado K-12 students spend taking standardized tests. It requires the state to seek federal waivers to shrink assessment requirements, creates a working group to map out testing cuts, and shifts the heavy cost of paper tests completely to local school districts.

What This Bill Actually Does

Every spring, public school schedules across Colorado are essentially paused so students can take their mandatory end-of-year standardized tests. Known under the umbrella of summative assessments—which measure everything a student has learned over a semester or a year, like the CMAS exams—these tests are meant to gauge school performance and student readiness. But a growing coalition of educators and policymakers argues these assessments take up too much valuable instructional time. This bill directs the Colorado Department of Education to scale back these standardized tests to the "minimum extent practicable" while still keeping a baseline read on academic achievement.

The biggest hurdle to canceling tests isn't state law; it's the federal government. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act mandates that states test students annually in specific grades and subjects. To get around this without losing federal funding, the bill requires the state to formally apply for a federal waiver within 90 days of the law taking effect. The state won't just ask to cancel the tests—they will pitch strategic alternatives. This could look like a shortened assessment, a sampling model (where only a randomly selected fraction of students take the test, similar to a public opinion poll), or a matrix sampling model (where all students are tested, but each student only takes a small, randomized portion of the exam, combining to give a full picture of the school's performance).

To figure out the logistics of this massive shift, the legislation also creates a 12-member State Assessments Modifications Working Group. This group is tasked with investigating concrete options for reducing testing time specifically in English, math, science, and social studies for grades three through eight. Additionally, the bill tackles the physical format of these exams. The state recently phased out paper-and-pencil testing to save money, moving entirely to digital platforms. Under this bill, if a local school district decides they still want to offer the paper version of the test, that Local Education Provider is required to foot the entire bill for the administrative costs.

What It Means for You

If you are a parent of a kid in the public school system, or a teacher trying to reclaim lost instructional hours, this represents a massive shift in how Colorado approaches education. For years, spring has meant weeks of disrupted schedules, computer lab lockouts, and stressed-out students. This bill signals a hard pivot away from the "test everyone on everything" mentality of the last two decades. The immediate goal is reclaiming classroom time by shrinking or restructuring those end-of-year exams so teachers can focus on teaching rather than test prep.

The reality is that Colorado already has a massive testing resistance movement. Many parents utilize their right to "opt out" their kids from the CMAS exams, which sometimes drops school participation rates so low that the resulting data becomes virtually useless for measuring a school's actual performance. By seeking a federal waiver to implement a sampling model, the state is essentially acknowledging this reality. If the U.S. Department of Education approves this waiver, your child might not have to take the statewide test every year. Instead, the state would test a representative sample of students—just enough to ensure the school is doing its job, but without putting the burden on every single family.

For families of students with special needs, particularly those with an Individualized Education Program (IEP), the shift in how paper tests are handled is something to watch closely. While computer-based testing is the state's default, some students require paper tests as an accommodation. The state allows this, but the bill specifically dictates that if local school districts want to use physical paper tests beyond strictly federally mandated accommodations, the district has to pay for it out of their own local budget. If your child prefers paper testing but doesn't have a formal, documented IEP requirement, your school district will likely deny the request to avoid the extra vendor fees.

What It Means for Your Business

From a business perspective, changes to state education standards inevitably create a ripple effect throughout the education technology and testing sector. Companies that contract with the state for test development, digital administration, data analytics, and test-prep materials will see a shrinking footprint if Colorado successfully transitions to a matrix sampling model or significantly shortened exams. Fewer testing hours and a smaller pool of test-takers equate to smaller state contracts for test administration. Ed-tech vendors should prepare for a landscape where the state is aggressively looking to downsize its testing vendor footprint.

If you operate a business that provides services to local school districts—such as local printing, logistics, transcription, or educational consulting—pay close attention to the new local cost-sharing rules. Because the bill requires Local Education Providers (school districts) to shoulder the financial burden if they opt for paper-and-pencil testing, districts are going to be forced into a corner. They will either strictly enforce digital testing to protect their budgets, or they will need to hire local vendors to help process, transcribe, and manage paper test materials locally before entering the data into the state's digital system.

Zooming out, there is a broader economic and workforce development angle to consider. Standardized test scores are currently one of the primary, standardized metrics that real estate developers, local businesses, and relocating families use to gauge the "quality" of a local school district—which in turn heavily drives housing demand and commercial property values. If Colorado moves to a randomized testing model, the granular, school-by-school data the market currently relies on to rank local education might fundamentally change or become less comprehensive. Employers who partner with local high schools for internships or apprenticeships may also need to start relying more on internal district metrics or alternative credentialing rather than state standardized data to gauge academic readiness in the local talent pipeline.

Follow the Money

The state-level fiscal impact here is relatively small, but highly specific. The bill requires an ongoing appropriation of $75,000 per year from the General Fund to the Colorado Department of Education. This money is entirely dedicated to rebuilding the backend infrastructure for grading paper tests. Because the state eliminated paper testing to save money, they stopped maintaining the roughly 19 distinct scanning programs needed to process physical exams. Even though the bill makes local districts pay to administer paper tests, the state must proactively rebuild and test these scanning programs just in case a district opts in.

At the local government level, the financial burden will vary wildly depending on the choices made by individual school boards. If a local school district decides it wants to offer paper-and-pencil tests, that district is fully on the hook for the printing, processing, shipping, and transcribing of those materials. This provides a massive financial disincentive for local districts to use paper testing, likely cementing computer-based exams as the only financially viable option for public schools moving forward. Any district that insists on widespread paper testing will have to divert funds from other areas of their general operating budget to cover the vendor fees.

Where This Bill Stands

SB26-068 is currently In Committee. The latest official action came on 05/05/2026: Senate Second Reading Laid Over to 05/14/2026 - No Amendments.

That means the bill is still in the committee stage, and it is currently sitting in the Education. To keep moving, it would need to clear committee and then survive floor votes in both chambers.