Last spring's sudden shift to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted K-12 education in an unprecedented way. Upon Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's waiver of federally mandated state testing for spring 2020, it also triggered the first nationwide break in state testing in half a century. With students returning to school for the 2020-21 school year, state boards of education will need to get a handle on exactly where students are in their learning in order to target resources and support. States also will need to restart annual assessments mandated by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in order to track progress over time, particularly for vulnerable subgroups of students. Yet even before the pandemic, two recent FutureEd reports found that state testing systems were already in transition. A national analysis by FutureEd found that between 2014 and 2019, lawmakers in 36 states passed legislation to respond to concerns about overtesting, including by reducing testing in a variety of ways. That trend is likely to continue, as opponents to standardized testing eye the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to leverage more cuts--and even end state testing entirely. At the same time, interest is growing in innovations that could make state testing systems more useful for teachers and students by moving away from a single, end-of-year test to more frequent assessments that better reflect classroom curriculum and instruction. As state boards think about the right questions to ask about testing in order to make smart decisions moving forward, it is important to understand the history of state summative assessment in the United States, the increasing fragmentation of the state testing landscape, and the larger political context.