���Ի徱���Բ�’s is officially on the books, pending a few final signatures.

The State Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to formally adopt the new statewide model, locking in a that state officials said better reflects student progress, literacy and post-graduation readiness.

“This has been something that has been a long time coming,” said Katie Jenner, ���Ի徱���Բ�’s secretary of education. “Many, many stakeholders around Indiana weighed in.”

after Indiana dismantled its previous accountability framework and rewrote high school graduation requirements. Schools have been without a grading system in the interim while the replacement model was in development.

The rule now heads to state Attorney General Todd Rokita, who has 45 days to sign off, and then to Gov. Mike Braun for final approval.

“This model values academic outcomes as well as skills and experiences. It’s so much more than just creating a robot who can memorize things,” said Paul Ketcham, assistant secretary of education. “It is a very granular model. Every student will have the opportunity to grow, and it’s our responsibility to grow them.”

“In 49 other states, it’s an accountability rule,” Ketcham said. “In Indiana, it’s a roadmap for schools and students and families to be successful.”

A familiar framework — with a rebuild

Indiana schools will continue to receive single-letter grades — A, B, C, D or F — under the new system, but those grades will now be calculated in a fundamentally different way.

Rather than relying primarily on schoolwide averages and standardized test scores, the new framework assigns points student by student. Jenner and other education officials have described it as a model in which schools earn credit for each individual student based on a combination of academic proficiency, growth and additional “success indicators” that vary by grade span.

Those student-level scores are averaged within separate grade bands — elementary, middle and high school — and combined into one overall A-F grade for each school.

The model was intentionally designed to move beyond an “all-or-nothing” approach and incorporate multiple measures while keeping academic mastery central, particularly reading and math in the early grades, according to a .

“No longer does an indicator encourage schools to dismiss certain students that might be way behind,” said Ron Sandlin, senior director of school performance and transformation for the Indiana Department of Education. “We fundamentally flipped the paradigm. Every student in a school generates points.”

At the high school level, the model more directly ties accountability to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s newly redesigned diplomas and diploma seals.

Graduation rate and SAT performance each make up 10% of a school’s grade-12 score, alongside measures tied to coursework, credentials, work-based learning and student engagement.

“What we’ve tried to do is understand the student in their entirety,” Jenner said. “So that they don’t get washed in simple numerator-denominator math that we’ve been doing for so long.”

Multiple education groups and other board members additionally voiced support during Wednesday’s meeting.

“This framework gives teachers the tools to celebrate and support success beyond a single test score,” said Rachel Hathaway, Indiana executive director at Teach Plus, a national nonprofit focused on education policy. “Accountability should not be about labeling schools. It should be about improving them.”

Todd Bess with the Indiana Association of School Principals emphasized that the new model “prioritizes student growth alongside proficiency.”

“It recognizes the progress schools make every day with students at all starting points. Moving up those that are below (proficiency). Those that are just about there — and then obviously, those that are still wildly proficient — keep moving them, too, and finding those success indicators,” Bess said. “Families and communities can better understand school performance … and what I like is we can say we’re going to add these things up. Every kid matters, and here’s the greatest outcome.”

A transition year before grades ‘count’

The new accountability system will roll out through a transition period Sandlin tagged “Year Zero,” which applies to the 2025-26 school year.

Letter grades for the current academic year will be calculated and publicly released under the new model, but they will be informational only and will not trigger any timelines or consequences tied to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability laws.

Sandlin said that the goal is to give schools and communities time to understand the new calculations and respond before the grades formally carry weight. Year Zero, he said, is intended to “set a clear baseline” and provide families and schools with transparent information about where performance stands under the new system.

IDOE plans to begin sharing detailed performance data with schools later this year, followed by the public release of Year Zero grades.

“This is different than any past A-F years,” Sandlin said.

As part of the transition, the grading scale will also be temporarily adjusted. For Year Zero, an A grade will span 85 to 100, rather than the traditional 90 to 100 range.

Starting with the 2026-27 school year, letter grades will once again count for accountability purposes. At that point, the cutoff for an A will gradually increase over time, rising by 2.5 points in any year when at least 25% of schools earn an A, until it reaches a final target of 90 to 100.

State officials said the approach is intended to allow an initial transition period while steadily increasing rigor as schools improve under the new model.

Wednesday’s vote followed months of revisions and public feedback led by IDOE, as well as parallel negotiations with federal education officials over ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability obligations.

Jenner said the — which would give Indiana added flexibility in how it aligns accountability and funding — to avoid locking in a model that was still being revised.

The seeks permission from the federal government to overhaul how Indiana spends and tracks billions of dollars in education aid — a request that Hoosier officials said would align the state’s accountability system with federal law and allow more freedom in how schools use their funds.

Hoosiers officials specifically requested exemptions from multiple provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, the federal law governing K-12 education, plus permission to combine funding from more than 15 federal education programs into a single “strategic block grant.”

The U.S. Department of Education has 120 days to review and respond to waiver applications once they’re received. ���Ի徱���Բ�’s was submitted in October, but the pause extends that timeline.

“We intentionally paused our federal waiver process as we were working through the final touches in our accountability model ….  in order to get this at the best place,” Jenner said. “We will unpause our waiver timeline shortly.”

“The fact that we’re doing this accountability work simultaneously as we’re working on our waiver has been a huge advantage to Indiana,” she said. “In addition to stakeholders in Indiana pushing us on some things, (federal officials) have also pushed us on some things. … A lot of people think policy work is threading the needle. We’ve had, like, multiple pieces of yarn.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

The Texas Education Agency last year launched plans to take over four school districts due to low academic performance, confiscating decision-making power from elected leaders based on state-issued F grades at six campuses.

All six trigger schools share notable similarities.

Between 80% and 97% of their students live in low-income households, far above the state average of 60%.

Black and Hispanic children make up the dominant majority of the student populations, from 88% at Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to almost every child at Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.

And nearly half of students at each school are on the fringes of dropping out — including 64% to 92% of kids on five of the six campuses.

�ձ�油��’ places a momentous decision in the hands of the state’s education commissioner. When at least one school receives an F for five years in a row, the commissioner must order the campus closed or initiate a state takeover of the entire district, replacing elected school board members with leaders of the education chief’s choosing.

Commissioner Mike Morath, in his decade as leader of the Texas Education Agency, has ordered two campuses closed: Snyder Junior High and Travis Elementary, both in West Texas. Snyder Junior High, located in the Snyder Independent School District, has since using a new academic framework. The Midland Independent School District with a charter school operator to overhaul Travis Elementary.

Over the same 10-year span, Morath ordered seven district takeovers based on academic performance, concluding that school leaders consistently demonstrated an inability to govern effectively and stood in the way of kids reaching their full potential.

But critics of the accountability system say state takeovers penalize districts based on factors beyond their control. Schools alone cannot solve inequality tied to race and poverty. Yet that inequality, critics say, helps explain why many of the takeover trigger schools in Texas share nearly identical characteristics.

“Not everybody gets a hot breakfast and Mom taking them to school or putting them on the bus and giving them a kiss on the cheek,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.

Morath last year announced his intention to appoint superintendents and replace the school boards of the Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally, and Lake Worth districts due to five consecutive F grades at . The Beaumont and Connally districts each had two schools that met the takeover threshold.

Morath said the districts’ inability “to implement effective changes to improve the performance of students” justified his decision. He also cited elevated percentages of children not meeting grade-level expectations across each district, not just at the trigger campuses.

In Fort Worth’s case — the second-largest takeover in state history, — Morath pointed out that districts of similar size and demographics had found ways to produce stronger academic results.

�ձ�油��’ accountability system measures school performance on an A-F scale. Based largely on the state’s standardized exam, ratings are intended to measure how well students learn, how students progress academically through the school year, and how schools perform compared to campuses with similar percentages of low-income students.

An F means at least 65% of children at the school tested below grade level.

“Getting an F is really, really hard to do in our system,” said Iris Tian, deputy commissioner of analytics, assessment and reporting for the Texas Education Agency. “For a campus to have gotten an F five years in a row, it is a disaster — it is truly an emergency.”

Low-income schools, including those educating mostly Black and Hispanic students, can thrive in Texas’ A-F system. In the most recent ratings, 382 out of 3,203 high-poverty campuses, or 12%, earned an A, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

But those campuses were the exception. Schools with high poverty were the least likely to earn an A and the most likely to receive Ds and Fs. Compared to low-poverty schools, those campuses were more than 30 times as likely to receive a D or F.

Similar disparities exist when factoring in race and ethnicity. Majority-Black schools were more than four times as likely as majority-white schools to receive a D or F, while majority-Hispanic schools were more than twice as likely.

Critics of the system argue that the state punishes schools without holding itself accountable, particularly when it comes to providing resources for a public education system that serves 5.5 million children — most of whom are Hispanic and Black and come from low-income households.

Research points to several strategies for improving outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, including , , and .

In Texas, however, schools spent six years without an increase in the state money they typically devote to salaries and operations, before the Legislature passed in 2025. The state has made it easier for schools to . Districts can no longer . And teachers are in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.

Texas also fails to address educational inequality when it focuses attention on testing outcomes at the expense of other in-school factors that impede the academic progress of Black and Hispanic students, said Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization.

Students of color, for example, have faced discipline because their . Some have sat through lessons that . Others have

“What good is it to have moderately improved reading levels that come from a state takeover when the children are being called the N-word every day and cannot have a peaceful environment in which they learn and seek to grow?” Hairston said.

Hairston expressed frustration that the accountability system also does not consider the lingering effects of residential segregation, community resistance to integration, or cuts to federal and state resources. That means, he said, Texas is not adequately measuring schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most.

The best school leaders and education reform efforts take those societal factors into account, said Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty and inequality.

When that doesn’t happen, he said, students in need of the most help can end up worse off.

“If we want our children to be successful in Texas, we have to pay attention to those districts where parents aren’t making as much money, where there’s lower levels of educational attainment,” Sanborn said. “That often translates into immigrant communities, Black and brown communities, and I think people don’t like to talk about that in Texas.”

“Meeting the needs of all students”

The Texas Education Agency insists the A-F system helps districts improve outcomes by “accurately and fairly evaluating school performance.”

“Inequality cannot be addressed by hiding outcomes, but instead, must be addressed by improving them,” agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement. “Our state’s legal framework ensures that school leaders remain focused on meeting the needs of all students, regardless of their background.”

In recent letters to school leaders announcing the state’s intention to intervene in their districts, Morath said unacceptable performance in a single year represents a “significant academic weakness.” When it continues for multiple years, he wrote, “the children in those campuses develop significant academic gaps.”

“We clearly have a school system that has prevented children from getting the education to which they are morally entitled,” Morath said last year at the University of Texas, where he spoke about the academic takeover in Fort Worth. “What do you do when you have a situation where our locally elected school board has, for really over a decade, been sort of incapable, for whatever reason — sins of omission, sins of commission — of giving kids a shot at success in America?”

Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally school district, understands why the commissioner often attributes school struggles to governance, saying district leaders in her community did not adequately respond to students’ academic shortcomings prior to her appointment in 2023. 

But Bottelberghe also feels state leaders do not fully understand how factors outside of school can hinder academic performance. The state’s accountability system gives schools some grace by taking into account socioeconomic makeup and measuring academic growth beyond just kids’ mastery of content, but she doesn’t think the system goes far enough.

Bottelberghe’s Waco-area district includes students who have to wake themselves up in the morning because their parents cannot, athletes who rely on coaches for rides because buses don’t run early enough, and children who don’t always know where they’re going to lay their head at night.

“It’s very unfortunate that we have so many kids that are in that situation,” Bottelberghe said. “I think people lose sight.”

Tian of the Texas Education Agency acknowledges that academics are not the only important factor in education.

But one of the primary goals of the accountability system, she said, is to direct attention to where children need academic support. Schools can have strong internal cultures and positive relationships with their communities, but if they lack rigorous quality instruction, Tian said, “kids are not going to be where they need to be.”

“Really, all the intervention is, is like, ‘Let’s try something new because what we’ve been doing for the past few years has not been working.’ These kids are not getting what they deserve. And we have to do something different,” Tian said.

“We felt alone”

State takeovers can severely disrupt community morale, said Kevin Jackson, who provides behavioral support to children at the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program in Beaumont.

More than a decade before the state announced plans to replace its school leaders for academic reasons, the Beaumont district was taken over due to concerns about its financial practices. Jackson, a 25-year veteran of the district and president of the Beaumont Teachers Association, said the previous intervention left educators and students feeling punished for acts they weren’t responsible for.

“We felt alone,” Jackson said. “We felt like we were put on an island out there by ourselves, because you remove the people that we elected to work with us and protect us and help us create a better district. You removed all of the board and everyone from their positions, and you brought in your own people. And as a result, that didn’t look well, because the people that you brought in weren’t familiar with this area. I don’t believe you were really tuned in to what was really going on here in Beaumont.”

The education agency and supporters of the accountability system often cite the Houston Independent School District as an example of what takeovers can accomplish. �ձ�油��’ largest school district educates a population of mostly Black and Hispanic children, while roughly 80% of students come from low-income households.

Since the state takeover in 2023, the Houston school district has seen in test scores. Last school year, it had — down significantly from before the intervention.

But critics say the takeover also serves as an example of what can happen when leaders emphasize testing metrics over the broader school climate.

Teachers and students have . District leaders have struggled to earn trust, as evidenced by 58% of 450,000 voters aimed at improving school infrastructure. Some Houston residents are skeptical about whether short-term academic success on standardized exams will lead to sustained progress in the years to come.

Education research on offers a wider glimpse at the potential impact on students:

• Takeovers across the U.S. are more likely to occur in districts where students of color and low-income children constitute a majority of the schools’ populations.
• Takeovers tend to increase per-student spending and some measures of schools’ financial health.
• Takeovers have demonstrated more positive academic effects on districts with large concentrations of Hispanic students but have affected Black students more neutrally or even negatively.
• Takeovers, on average, do not improve test scores.

The Texas Education Agency says comparing academic performance before and after takeovers shows improved governance and higher test scores in nearly all state-operated districts, defying the national trend.

Beth Schueler, an education professor and researcher at Stanford University, said it’s also important to evaluate simultaneous trends in similarly sized districts not under state control, providing a more reliable measure of a takeover’s impact.

Still, Schueler noted, conversations about how to best serve the most vulnerable children are common nationwide, with broad agreement that education must focus on what’s best for children before opinions differ on which policies can best make that happen.

The presence of so many societal constraints leaves an important question for state leaders and local educators: What are reasonable expectations for schools?

“I don’t think we want to lose sight of the fact that the demographic composition of a school system is the thing that’s going to be the most predictive of variation in performance and outcomes,” Schueler said.

“But I do think there’s room for education systems to make a difference, because we’ve seen that they can make a difference,” she added. “There’s limits to what they can do, and I think that’s important context. But it’s not as though we should give up, I think, on trying to make more effective education policy.”

Alex Nguyen and Rob Reid contributed to this story.

Disclosure: Texas Appleseed and Texas State Teachers Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed paring down the responsibilities of California’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and shifting more power to the State Board of Education.

“California can no longer postpone reforms that have been recommended regularly for a century,” Newsom said, referring to numerous reports over the years that have suggested streamlining the state’s system of K-12 school governance.

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“These critical reforms will bring greater accountability, clarity and coherence to how we serve our students and schools,” Newsom said.

The move is intended to simplify California’s convoluted education governance, which have said can be inefficient, redundant and sometimes at cross purposes.

Under his proposal, the State Board of Education, an 11-member body appointed by the governor, would take over the California Department of Education. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction would have broader responsibility to “foster coordination and alignment of state education policies from early childhood through post secondary education.” The proposal didn’t offer further details.

For more than a century, the state’s public K-12 schools have been governed by a web of authorities, both locally and at the state level. In Sacramento, the governor, state superintendent, State Board of Education and the Legislature all share policy-making duties, which may shift every few years depending on the political winds. The Department of Education, under the direction of the state superintendent, is supposed to carry out those policies.

Locally, school boards and county offices of education also hold power over schools, especially since the state switched to a funding system about a decade ago that gives . County offices, among other duties, are charged with overseeing school district budgets.

California has a somewhat unique system of school governance. It’s one of only nine states that elects a schools chief. In other states, the top schools officer is appointed by the governor or the board of education, by Education Commission of the States.

Newsom’s proposal echoes a by Policy Analysis for California Education which called for an overhaul of the state’s school governance structure.

“The need for stronger, more coherent governance has never been greater. Schools are grappling with fiscal challenges alongside deepening inequities, persistent opportunity gaps, and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning and well-being,” the report’s authors wrote.

The issue is especially urgent, they said, as the federal government reels back its involvement in K-12 schools. President Donald Trump is in the process of shuttering the federal Department of Education, spinning off its duties to the states and other federal agencies. Federal education funding is also increasingly precarious, giving states more direct responsibility for educating children.

The PACE authors suggested several solutions, including the proposal that Newsom put forth. Under the PACE recommendation, the Department of Education would be run by an administrator appointed by the State Board of Education, and the superintendent would act as an independent advocate, with an eye on accountability. Most of the power and responsibility for schools would lie with the governor.

Previous proposals

This is not the first time the issue has arisen. Several ballot measures over the years — none successful — have sought to change the role of the state superintendent. In 2023, , by former , a Democrat from Sacramento, would have made the position . McCarty withdrew it amid opposition from the California Teachers Association, the California School Boards Association and other groups.

In his proposal, Newsom cited other previous reports recommending changes to state schools governance, including one from 2002 and another from 1920.

The state’s current superintendent, Tony Thurmond, is winding down his second term. During his tenure, the department has expanded literacy efforts, community schools, student wellness programs and other initiatives. He’s also faced criticism for and creating a “.”

Thurmond, who terms out in 2026, is running for governor.

Newsom’s proposal has backing from a wide array of education players, including the Association of California School Administrators, California Association of School Business Officials, Californians Together, which advocates for English learners, and EdTrust-West, a research and advocacy organization focused on equity.

”For far too long, California’s fractured education governance system has contributed to persistent inequities disproportionately impacting low-income students, students of color and multilingual learners,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director of EdTrust-West. “EdTrust-West commends Governor Newsom for championing these essential reforms.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

The , led by the University of California-Riverside, followed more than 54,000 South Carolina students from the time they entered ninth grade at low-performing schools — primarily between the years 2000 and 2005 — until 2017, when most were in their early 30s.

The arrest rate for graduates of unsatisfactory schools was 19.7%, versus 22.4% for below-average schools. 

The study also found improvements in student academic performance and school climate, but no changes involving teacher turnover, per-pupil spending or the replacement of principals.

“It appears that accountability pressures prompted schools to implement policies that led to changes in school climate, which, in turn, manifest as improvements in short-term success and long-term reductions in criminal involvement,” the study said.

In , schools can be labeled unsatisfactory, below average, average, good or excellent. Low-performing schools are often required to create an improvement plan and set by the state. If schools don’t make progress, the state may replace their leaders or even take over. 

Researchers have of school accountability systems — another recent study found that only 29% of school leaders across the nation said the ratings help improve student outcomes. 

But other that turnaround programs are associated with better attendance, test scores and graduation rates.

The California researchers measured school climate by the percentage of students who felt satisfied with their learning, social and physical environments at school. The student satisfaction with the learning environment at unsatisfactory schools was nearly 65%, compared with 60.6% in below-average schools. Satisfaction with the social and physical environment was about 71% for unsatisfactory schools but 66.4% for those that were below average.

More than 64% of 10th graders passed standardized tests in unsatisfactory schools compared to 61.6% in below average schools. 

“Improving low-performing schools is a perennial problem,” the study said. “Policymakers have implemented various strategies to turn around struggling schools. Our findings are intriguing in that they suggest the existence of policies and practices that low-performing schools have implemented when they faced increased accountability pressures.”

Recognizing the stakes, three years ago the school underwent a complete overhaul, and the change has been remarkable. Monte Vista has seen math proficiency rise from to , and English Language Arts proficiency climbed from to on the Smarter Balanced Assessment. 

Here are three ways Monte Vista Elementary changed its trajectory and saw meaningful growth.

First and foremost, change began by reimagining the definition of leadership. Rather than relying on top-down directives, the school adopted a model built on trust, collaboration and shared purpose. The goal was simple but powerful: empower teachers to make instructional decisions and position them as partners in driving improvement.

Teacher leadership teams and data-driven professional learning communities were established, keeping student performance at the center of every conversation. These teams analyzed data, identified gaps and collectively determined next steps, ensuring that professional development and instructional strategies were grounded in real classroom needs.

Teacher leaders visited classrooms across grade levels to identify educators’ strengths, growth areas and opportunities to refine practice. The feedback was shared with the full staff, and teachers collaborated to design targeted action plans — whether that meant adjusting curriculum, securing supplemental resources or carving out additional planning time.

Peer observations further deepened this culture of collaboration. Model teachers opened their classrooms so colleagues could see effective strategies in action and reflect together on what worked. This kind of teacher-to-teacher learning proved far more impactful than traditional training approaches. It built shared ownership for student success, professional trust and a collective commitment to doing whatever it takes to improve student outcomes.

The second change came about when school leaders confronted an uncomfortable truth: The data didn’t add up. Internal assessments suggested strong growth, yet students’ performance on state tests told a different story. Misalignment between those results and Smarter Balanced scores signaled a deeper issue: Students could complete assignments that relied on following set steps accurately, but they struggled when asked to apply concepts or reason through complex problems.

Classroom instruction needed to mirror the cognitive rigor students would encounter on the Smarter Balanced exam. To bridge that gap, the school implemented a that provided real-time feedback, question-by-question performance data and types of questions designed to prepare students for the deeper thinking required on state assessments.

Teachers could now see in-the-moment how students were reasoning through problems, identify misconceptions immediately and adjust instruction before small gaps became larger ones. The platform’s dashboards made error analysis part of daily practice, revealing not just what students missed, but why. Educators began using this insight to reteach key concepts, group students flexibly and design interventions that targeted specific learning gaps.

Equally important, the tool reframed assessment as learning. Students were no longer passively tested — they were actively reflecting on their own thinking. They learned to articulate their reasoning, analyze their mistakes and approach challenging problems with confidence.

Integrating this technology also deepened the staff’s collective approach to teaching. With clear evidence at their fingertips, teachers collaborated around patterns in student learning, refining both their questions and their approaches to conceptual teaching. Over time, this focus on strategic approaches to problem-solving — rather than procedural repetition — became part of the school’s DNA.

The result was a powerful alignment between classroom learning and assessment performance. Students weren’t just better test-takers; they were stronger thinkers, capable of transferring understanding across subjects and demonstrating mastery under pressure.

The third component was engaging families through listening. Parents are involved through advisory committees that review data, provide input and offer feedback that is incorporated into achievement plans for English learners, students with special needs and gifted students. 

Over time, the school’s data culture has evolved from one focused on accountability to one centered on celebration — viewing results as a story of growth rather than a measure of failure. Each initiative is anchored in evidence, collaboration and recognition of progress, no matter the scale, ensuring that insights gained from data reach beyond the classroom. Family literacy and numeracy nights, “coffee with the principal” meetings and community events all connect data-driven academic progress, behavior and culture into a coherent framework that invites families to see and share in student success.

Monte Vista shows that regardless of students’ backgrounds or starting points, when teachers collaborate around shared goals, incorporate strategic thinking and prioritize family involvement, educational outcomes change. The focus moving forward is to sustain the assessment-driven cycles that have guided progress, deepen student ownership of learning and maintain a commitment to equity, excellence and the shared belief that our students will succeed.

From cutting social safety net programs and enacting unaccountable voucher programs at the expense of public schools to limiting access to financial aid for higher education, these stormy waters are setting American students adrift, eliminating important protections and creating ever greater barriers to an equitable education that sets young people up for success as adults. 

It’s more than just money; as Congress and the Trump administration have instituted perilous funding cuts that reduced support for nutrition programs, limited undocumented students’ access to important programs and dialed back enforcement of civil rights laws, federal agencies have eliminated and undermined vital data and education research. Without this information, there is no way to know how schools are working to address academic and opportunity disparities — particularly for Black and Latino students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those from low-income backgrounds. 

The U.S. Department of Education by inviting states to seek waivers from the that have, for over two decades, required annual student testing and public, disaggregated reporting of those results. Allowing states to alter established assessment systems and hide data on school quality will leave parents, educators and policymakers without important information they need to help students succeed. 

In order for this to work, the federal government will need partners in states to do the dirty work. Unfortunately, history shows they’ll be amenable. 

At least three states have already begun the formal process of asking for waivers from accountability. 

Oklahoma, which already lowered the bar for proficiency on its state assessments, wants to and replace them with a series of as-yet unidentified tests throughout the year to measure student achievement in language arts and math or the Classic Learning Test, which covers a more limited knowledge base — primarily the Western and Christian canons — and has been used primarily for homeschool and private school students. The Oklahoma waiver would also mean the state could stop providing testing accommodations and alternate assessments for students with disabilities and English learners. Together, this would make it impossible to measure the academic progress of all students.

Indiana wants to redirect federal funding away from migrant students, at-risk kids, multilingual learners, children in rural areas and the lowest-performing schools. State leaders also seek to change how they rate schools, in a way that would tell families, advocates, policymakers, and others little because of the proposed methodology.

Like Indiana, Iowa wants the power to redirect federal funds away from underserved student groups. But Iowa goes a step further, asking the department to reinterpret the law to let it stop prioritizing federal funds for schools with the highest poverty levels. Not only would this be overreach by the Department of Education — legally, it can’t allow this type of change without congressional approval — it would change the rules for all states, undermining the objective of Title I to increase financial support for students in high-poverty school districts.

It remains to be seen what other ideas states will cook up under the guise of promoting innovation and reducing administrative burdens, and how those initiatives will endanger students’ educational opportunities. But the leaders of 12 states wrote to Washington earlier this year, requesting not only a robust use of federal waiver authority, but a strong deference to state law and a consolidation of federal education funding. 

To be sure, there is a place for federal flexibility. The Education Department in the first Trump administration wisely gave a year’s reprieve on annual testing when the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools. The Biden administration offered flexibility for Montana to test a new, innovative assessment model, while maintaining civil rights protections. Current federal law already allows states to experiment with innovative assessments and funding, although few states have taken advantage of these initiatives.

This isn’t some wonky technical issue; annual assessments provide important information that helps parents make educational decisions for their children, teachers to adjust classroom practices and policymakers to craft laws and allocate resources. Strong accountability measures force adults to take a hard look at how schools are serving the most vulnerable students and take action. Targeted funding provides additional opportunities for students from backgrounds long marginalized by America’s education system. 

This waiver program is just one in a series of decisions that is putting students and the country’s future at risk. Ending the collection of this data will limit everyone’s ability to see the long-term consequences of other harmful policies.   

The Education Department should reconsider its stance on waivers and instead do what’s right for students: ensure that states remain accountable for improving outcomes. Real students’ futures — and America’s future as a nation — are at stake.

This low vote of confidence on current accountability systems comes at a time when schools and districts face profound challenges. Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the world of and . Basic literacy and math skills have been sliding for more than a decade. Families increasingly with the needs and aspirations of their children. Reimagining school to meet these demands means reimagining the systems of assessment and accountability that surround them.

For the first time in decades state and federal leaders are showing unprecedented openness to rethinking assessment and accountability. This shift offers both promise and peril, especially for new models of learning: Choosing systems with outdated metrics can smother innovation before it takes root, while too little accountability can leave students without clear standards or comparability across schools. 

the answer is to double down — strengthen accountability and demand more tests. Others increasingly question whether holding schools accountable for test scores makes sense at all.  But the Canopy survey reveals that school leaders want neither extreme. Only 10% of Canopy leaders favored eliminating accountability altogether, but just 5% supported maintaining the status quo. 

Leaders are eager for reform, the Canopy survey revealed. But they also warn that one of the most popular reforms under discussion—through-year testing—may be moving in exactly the wrong direction.

Among these leaders’ critiques of existing systems is a familiar charge — that they rarely provide useful data for improvement. Fewer than one in three leaders said accountability data helps them adjust instruction in meaningful ways. Even fewer found it useful for supporting English learners or students with disabilities. In practice, the data often arrives too late, reflects too narrow a slice of student learning or simply confirms what educators already know from their own local measures.

To address these shortcomings, many states are betting on . Instead of a single end-of-year exam, these states administer multiple shorter assessments throughout the year, with the goal of producing timelier and more actionable data. Montana has rolled out a ; Texas passed legislation this fall to replace its annual testing with assessments ;  Missouri recently secured to pilot one under the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority; and several other states have either adopted similar plans or are in the process of considering them.

Yet Canopy leaders surveyed are skeptical. When asked to rank possible reforms, they overwhelmingly preferred less testing, not more — by nearly three to one. Their reasons are straightforward. While students may only be tested for several hours, the work required from adults for paperwork, preparation, and proctoring can be overwhelming. Several leaders also stressed that reducing state testing would free up space for richer, performance-based assessments — like public exhibitions, debates, or mock trials — that give students authentic opportunities to demonstrate mastery and teachers find much more instructionally useful.

The case for through-year testing rests on shaky assumptions: that state assessments are inherently more trustworthy than other measures, that they provide unique value beyond what teachers already collect, and that the logistical headaches are worth the benefits. The Canopy Project survey and interviews suggest otherwise. For many Canopy school leaders, through-year testing feels like a well-meaning but misguided boss who requires you to submit a new weekly report “to make your job easier.” Adding new state-mandated tests risks increasing the administrative burden on schools to generate additional data that educators do not want and will not use.

Despite their critiques, school leaders aren’t calling for accountability to disappear. On the contrary, only 10% of Canopy leaders favored eliminating accountability altogether. But even fewer support maintaining the status quo. They voiced strong support for systems that uphold equity and transparency while evolving in three key ways:

First, states should focus on right-sizing the assessment footprint. Don’t ditch testing, but be realistic that no single test can effectively serve multiple purposes. State-mandated tests should be designed to be useful for policymakers, researchers, and other state-level actors, not individual schools or teachers. Accordingly, states should explore that provide necessary information for state actors while minimizing the administrative burden on schools.

Second, states should differentiate accountability requirements — without lowering standards — for different kinds of schools. Leaders of specialized schools told us that accountability systems ignored progress on indicators that are core to their missions, like providing industry-accepted credentials or reengaging students after extended absences from formal schooling. In Washington, D.C., the Public Charter School Board has launched a new accountability framework that provides room for “school-specific indicators,” mutually agreed upon by schools and the authorizer; states could consider a similar approach.

Finally, states have the opportunity to incorporate a broader set of measures into accountability systems, such as those related to learning opportunities and student engagement. States like Illinois already in their accountability systems, and Canopy leaders are interested in scaling up their use while exploring ways to .

Accountability systems need reform, but simply doubling down on existing models by layering on through-year tests is not the answer. Instead, new learning models require new forms of accountability so that today’s guardrails don’t become tomorrow’s handcuffs.

Of course this phenomenon isn’t unique to education. But its problematic effects have played an outsized role in the K-12 arena in recent years.

First, there were the COVID-era school closures. The effort to reopen schools was initially by partisanship. But when President Donald Trump championed in-person learning in the summer of 2020, reopening became coded in red and blue. and swiftly rebuked Trump on the issue. Ordinary voters in turn. Reopening then became a partisan quagmire that put kids last.

But as has been , the decline in student achievement wasn’t just a pandemic phenomenon. The decline began much earlier, exacerbated during the retreat from consequential accountability, and steepened even more post pandemic.

As student outcomes remain moribund today, leaders in both parties are doing far too little to reverse these trends. This time around the obstacle isn’t COVID reopening battles or culture wars. It’s mainly about the of the political class to signal, in a bipartisan manner, that holding schools accountable for student learning must be the cornerstone of American education. 

As Harvard Education professor Martin West put it while digesting the results of another disappointing NAEP assessment, “There is good evidence… that really does suggest a lot of [the academic] progress in the 1990s and 2000s was driven by test-based accountability.”  

Unfortunately, according to newly released survey data, accountability advocates have lost the public, and Democratic voters in particular. 

As part of the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) , I asked a national sample of voters two questions about their support for the two key pillars of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reform agenda: testing and accountability. Crucially, these questions were asked using the same language that pollsters at PDK/Gallup used back in 2001. Specifically, voters in both surveys were asked: Would you favor or oppose each of the following measures that have been proposed as part of a national education program in the US:

• Increased use of standardized tests for measuring student achievement 
• Holding the public schools accountable for how much students learn 

The chart below displays the percentage of Americans, separately by political party, who said that they favor increased use of testing to measure student achievement.

While it’s true that support for standardized testing has declined among all Americans – no doubt due in part to during the height of NCLB – the drop has been far more concentrated among Democrats. Whereas six in 10 Democrats favored more testing to measure student achievement back in 2001, today just one in three do (Figure 1). 

But the Democratic backlash to the bipartisan reform agenda goes beyond an aversion to more testing. Democrats have also lost faith in accountability. Back when the Bush administration was lobbying to enact NCLB, Democratic voters favored holding schools accountable for student achievement slightly more than did Republicans. In the intervening decades, however, Democratic support for accountability has nosedived.

Why have Democrats soured so much on testing and accountability? 

The answer surely has something to do with “follow the leader” politics. Democrats’ attitudes followed a in the way prominent Democrats spoke about school reform. Leaders, including President Joe Biden, spurned President Barack Obama’s reform agenda and instead the teachers unions’ anti-testing and accountability posture.

Since then, ordinary Democratic voters have taken notice.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, teachers unions pushed for a permanent end to high-stakes testing in Massachusetts. In 2024 they succeeded: The state’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate voted against keeping passing MCAS as a graduation requirement. 

While it’s unlikely that voters soured on reform solely because their party and union leadership did first, there is some evidence consistent with this follow-the-leader dynamic. 

Since Barack Obama left office, rank-and-file Democrats have become far more supportive of teachers unions. For example, in 2014, Harvard’s EdNext poll found that one in four Democrats believed teachers unions had a negative effect on schools. A decade later, my CES survey, asking an identical question, found that just one in 20 Democrats view the unions negatively. Instead, six in 10 said teachers unions have a positive effect on schools.  

Notably, it is the larger base of pro-union Democrats who are more likely to oppose test-based accountability than their fellow Democrats who are union skeptics. The bottom line: Testing and accountability became less popular among Democratic voters after the party’s elected officials and their powerful labor partners firmly united publicly against these positions.

Although we can’t disentangle cause and effect with precision here, this timing is consistent with political science research that shows voters often take cues from political leaders, rather than independently forming opinions first and influencing politicians.

As Democrats gear up to try and win back the White House in 2028, the party’s choice in a standard bearer will have important implications for the future tone and direction of education politics. 

“Even if the feds decide that they’re not going to require statewide assessments, that is not something that I’m going to buy into,” she said. “The moment you lower standards, you do kids a disservice.”

With President Donald Trump on a path to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and revert power back to the states, Wright’s words gave urgency to a burning issue state leaders have been wrestling with for months.

While Education Secretary Linda McMahon has declared it’s “absolutely” necessary to continue the National Assessment of Educational Progress — which allows the public to compare student performance across states — she’s so far been silent on federal requirements for state testing and the need to identify low-performing schools for extra support. The lack of a plan has left some wondering if sending education “back to the states,” as Trump is fond of saying, means abandoning what has been a mainstay of education policy for more than 20 years.  

“This is one of the discussions that the department, the administration, the Senate and House need to talk through,” said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a right leaning think tank that supports Trump’s agenda. 

A department official during the president’s first term, he argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law that spells out federal requirements for testing and accountability, has had little impact on holding students to high standards. 

“States that do not want to be transparent about their testing results simply aren’t,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, just go and try and find the results for any state.”

As the president’s plan takes shape, some Republicans are trying to remove those annual testing and accountability requirements altogether. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota reintroduced last week that would not only eliminate the education department, but also repeal ESSA. In exchange for a federal block grant, states would be required to submit student data to the Treasury Department, complete an annual audit and follow civil rights laws — but not conduct annual tests.

The rationale is clear, said Charles Barone, senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union: Maintaining some federal authority over testing and accountability could imply there’s still a role for the department.

“Sen. Rounds’ bill simply has federal programs as money streams,” he said. “No policy attached.”

Since the pandemic, a handful of states, like Oklahoma, and , have rolled back expectations for passing state tests. The changes are likely to result in more students reaching grade-level targets even if they haven’t learned more. The trend has revived debate over the “honesty gap” — the discrepancy between NAEP’s higher standard for proficiency and the often lower bar set by states. 

Others, like and education Secretary Aimee Guidera are phasing in tougher assessment and accountability systems. To Blew, that shows the federal government should just stay out of the way. 

“At the end of the day, states are going to determine this,” he said. “Let’s give them the freedom to do that.”

Passed a decade ago, ESSA requires states to test all students in third through eighth grades in reading and math, to assess students once in high school and to ensure at least 95% of students participate in testing. States also have to break down results by race and for different student groups, including those in poverty, English learners and students with disabilities. 

The major components meet the threshold of what Barone describes as the “” for accountability. 

Testing every student allows parents to get assessment results for their own children, which can then be used to determine where students are struggling or if they need more challenging work. 

Disaggregating the results shines a light on how districts serve historically marginalized students — data that is especially important to policymakers and advocacy groups. Finally, a common test allows for apples-to-apples comparisons across schools and districts. 

“Over the years, a consensus has formed that you want certain guardrails in place,” Barone said.  

‘A federal backstop’

Observers don’t expect Rounds’ bill to get very far. But some call it a harbinger of a return to the days , the strict accountability law that preceded ESSA. In the 1990s, just a fraction of states tested students every year and many imposed no consequences for failing schools. 

“I think accountability is already at a pretty low point,” said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri. “If things go back to the states even more formally, I would just expect that unwinding to complete itself.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the education committee, is expected to introduce another proposal to eliminate the education department and revamp the role of the federal government in education. Blew said that bill could be weeks away. 

Democrats and some state leaders warn that dumping federal testing and accountability requirements and issuing block grants would allow states to turn their backs on the neediest students.

“If you get rid of accountability, you’re just essentially giving [states] a blank check,” said Stephanie Lalle, communications director for the Democrats on the House education committee. Federal mandates, she said, are how you push them to “not discriminate and incentivize them to close the achievement gap.”

At a February conference on assessment and accountability in Dallas, Virginia ed secretary Guidera shared data showing how her state’s performance on NAEP steadily improved between 2003 and 2013 — the NCLB years. 

The landmark education law, which set strict testing and accountability requirements in exchange for Title I funds, passed in 2002. Data shows the policy led to nationally, but it quickly became highly unpopular. The law set ambitious goals for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, but drew considerable pushback from critics who said it led schools to teach to the test. But even if states continue their own testing and accountability systems, Guidera doesn’t want Washington out of the picture.

“We need the federal backstop,” she told ����Ӱ��. “We have to have high standards, and we need to be honest with ourselves about where every child is.” 

‘A rallying cry’

Opposition to standardized testing comes from both the left and the right. Educators grumble that it eats up too much class time and that results from spring tests come back too late to help students or make adjustments for the fall. Others, , say state tests offer a narrow view of student learning. 

The question is what states would do if the federal government were no longer in the picture. In his conversation with Wright and other experts earlier this month, Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, leaned on a handy metaphor: a motorcycle cop holding a radar gun. 

“What if nobody was checking your speed?” he asked.

State leaders have been thinking about the possibilities.

Rep. Robert Behning, an Indiana state legislator, said he “would be willing to look at other options, like sampling” — giving tests to a random, representative group of students instead of everyone. can be less of a drain on teachers’ and students’ time and still give the public district and school-level results. But the tradeoff is that most parents would be left in the dark about their children’s performance.  

Other state leaders like the idea of spreading assessments rather than building up toward one big test.

“We’ve got better assessments that tell us more about our students,” Eric Mackey, Alabama state superintendent, said during a in March.  

But research shows there are with arriving at a final score for the year and the model might not reduce testing time.

Marion giving state exams every other year, which would allow more time in the intervening years to employ innovative methods like asking students to complete a project to demonstrate their learning.

Marianne Perie, an assessment expert who advises states on test design, said she wouldn’t be surprised if Oklahoma completely stopped giving statewide assessments. In March, state Superintendent Ryan Walters questioned the integrity of the 2024 results, even though they were included in for districts and schools.

But in other states like Tennessee and Mississippi, annual tests have been “a rallying cry” for parents and policymakers, said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who tracks states’ . 

Such states “have championed their gains in the last few years,” especially in English language arts, she said. 

Tennessee, for example, was among the first to bounce back from pandemic-era learning loss. At the same time, the fact that roughly 60% of third graders still scored below grade level in reading was worrisome enough to lawmakers that they passed a law requiring students to be retained or get extra help over the summer and retake the test. 

Remote learning during the pandemic and in-depth reporting on poor literacy instruction has also motivated more parents to push for improvements.

“Parents are increasingly demanding accountability from their educational system, which will make sunsetting these assessments more complex,” Oster said.

Roughly value state assessments and think they should be used to guide support for struggling schools and students, according to a National Parents Union poll.

‘Come up with something better’ 

If the federal government does hand more control over assessment and accountability to states, Barone said it’s far more likely to happen through waivers from McMahon than legislation. 

ESSA allows the secretary to excuse states from annual assessments. That’s what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did in 2020 during the pandemic. She waived the accountability provisions for both 2020 and 2021. Barone sees no reason why McMahon wouldn’t do the same. 

A former Democratic staffer in the House, he thinks it would be hard to improve on the existing testing regimen. But even he agrees that the accountability side of the equation hasn’t led to measurable progress in how states support — and attempt to turn around — their most troubled schools. 

The law requires states to identify the lowest-performing 5% of schools, analyze why they’re struggling and adopt a proven , like coaching teachers or changing leadership. But a report found that less than half of states were complying with those requirements.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that even those that are doing it are doing it well,” Barone said. Maybe Trump’s planned overhaul of the federal role in education, he said, is an opportunity to “come up with something better.”

But in recent years, my home state of Indiana has shown that a better approach is possible by tracking and life-outcome metrics such as income and employment five years after high school graduation. 

Indiana Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner should be commended for these efforts, and more states should emulate this approach. That would nudge schools to tailor their work towards helping students build the skills and mindsets to succeed in life, better meeting the interests of families and community. 

How can schools do this effectively at scale?

One model lies in Christel House International, which for years has been measuring success based on our ability to help students from under-resourced backgrounds achieve economic mobility. Our global network includes no-fee private schools in India, Jamaica, Mexico, and South Africa, and in the U.S., both public charters and schools operated in partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools.

A major component of the Christel House model is our College & Careers program. Every Christel House student is paired with a coach starting in high school to help provide mentorship, guidance, and personalized support in preparing for post-high school education and the workforce. Students also gain valuable career exposure and process those experiences with their coaches, helping them better understand their interests and strengths. 

Critically, the coaches remain with students for five years after graduation so they can help troubleshoot the challenges that come with navigating postsecondary education or the working world. And students are guaranteed access to financial support for five years post-graduation to help address unanticipated life events that can derail progress.

Data on our graduates’ outcomes affirms that our approach is working. In our home base of Indianapolis, for example, the Indiana Department of Education reported that across our first four graduating cohorts, Christel House Indianapolis alumni are the second highest income-earners on average among public school graduates in the city five years after high school graduation, and they’re the top income earners among Indianapolis public schools serving a high percentage of students from low-income backgrounds. Globally, 95% of recent Christel House graduates are employed or in school, and 72% of graduates demonstrate upward economic mobility at age 23. 

We arrived at this approach based on our longstanding mission – established by our founder, entrepreneur Christel DeHaan – that schools’ role should be elevating the life outcomes of students, especially those who are experiencing poverty. Decades ago, our inaugural high school graduates performed well academically, but some of them struggled to successfully transition to life beyond high school. We knew we needed to revise our approach to better support their success, and we have been refining our model ever since. 

We still have room to grow. For example, while our U.S. students’ average annual incomes of approximately $37,000 five years after graduation help them achieve livable wages relative to median income in Indiana, we aim to elevate that average so that students who graduate from our schools feel financially secure sooner. A 2023 survey revealed that 76% of Christel House Indianapolis graduates feel comfortable paying their bills each month, but only 43% have savings to cover a large, unexpected expense. 

In efforts to improve education, it’s critical not to lose sight of our original goal: helping students build a good, successful, and productive life. That’s why Christel House expanded its College & Careers program into four schools outside of our network for the first time this year, with $1.5 million in public and private funding. More states should put funding behind this outcomes-oriented approach, which would yield a great return on a modest public investment. 

The more we look at data that measures life outcomes, the more we can design interventions that put students’ long-term success at the center. That will produce an immense positive outcome for our education system – and the students who most need our support.

Long championed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the project started from the that the existing state system used to evaluate school performance was not providing accurate information to parents or the public at large. In the wake of COVID-19, an analysis by Stanford and Harvard researchers that Virginia students suffered larger academic declines than those in almost any other state. And yet, the percentage of schools that were identified as needing to improve barely budged, rising from only 7% to 10%.

As a consultant working on the state’s new School Performance and Support Framework, I’ve had a front-row view into the changes. Some of them are unique to Virginia. For example, the commonwealth used to operate two accountability systems, one for federal compliance purposes and the other the state accreditation system that everyone actually paid attention to. That added complexity, with extra data points and additional paperwork, and it meant that Virginia was running two parallel systems that sometimes agreed, but sometimes did not.

Moreover, the state system was weak and purposefully obscured key data points. For example, rather than reporting student performance metrics separately and clearly, it used what it called a combined rate that added student achievement, progress and English proficiency rates into one overall measure, without a way to disentangle the three components.

Worse, the commonwealth made a series of decisions that hid the results of lower-performing student groups. In one particularly egregious example, it allowed school districts to exclude English learners from their ratings for up to 5½ years. Effectively, some schools were never held accountable for the learning outcomes of those students. When the state Department of Education counted those students, it found 35,000 marginalized kids who were being ignored.

The recent changes clean all that up. Newly arrived English learners will be tested and included after a one-year grace period, the maximum allowed under federal law. And Virginia will have one unified system that will reduce paperwork for school and district leaders and allow them to focus on one set of high-quality performance metrics. I’m also personally excited about a middle school , which will evaluate schools on whether they’re giving high-scoring students the chance to take algebra in eighth grade.  

Will the new framework boost student performance? Well, that depends on a lot of factors, not least of which is whether state policymakers sustain and build on the new system over time. For example, the state Board of Education had a lot of debates over the last year about how much to weight student achievement versus student growth. Because growth was only partially included in the old system, this will be the first year that all schools will be held accountable for the growth of all their students. That’s a big deal, but the allows for changing that balance over time. It also depends on how parents and educators perceive the changes over time.

We officially called the new system a because we were interested in accurately identifying schools that needed extra help, and we deliberately chose not to use A-F grades or use shaming language like “failing” schools. But time will tell if that original intent will stick and how the new system will be regarded once it becomes operational at the end of the current school year. 

that schools can and do respond to clear and transparent rating systems in ways that boost student outcomes in the short and long term. Last year, for example, a study came out that looked at the of a school accountability system South Carolina put in place in the year 2000. The authors found that high schools that were given a low accountability rating subsequently boosted attendance and achievement. More importantly, those benefits persisted: Kids who attended those schools had lower rates of criminal activity and were less likely to need welfare programs like food stamps throughout their 20s.

On the flip side, when states backed away from accountability a decade ago, it may have contributed to achievement declines and widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students. With attendance rates and achievement scores still well below where they were pre-COVID, now would seem like an especially important time to put these findings into practice. But in many parts of the country, policymakers are doing the opposite. recently weakened its school accountability system, while Oklahoma and are relaxing their testing standards.

School districts adopted their own versions of lax grading standards during the pandemic, and, while grades have from their COVID highs, they remain elevated. Easier grading standards may boost student scores in the short run. But they can also depress student effort and cause kids to learn less over time.

And, as Paul Peterson noted in a recent piece for Education Next, the presidential campaigns are completely of discussions of student learning results.

Virginia is bucking that trend. It’s trying to raise the bar on schools, and it’s betting that they can and will respond in ways that lead to improvements in student performance. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman helped write new accountability regulations for the commonwealth of Virginia.Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this essay.

Charter authorizers often fly under the radar, and few people understand the link between authorizers, accountability and learning. Even fewer grasp that the lessons authorizers can teach can help all students achieve more.

The nature of charter schools is that they are granted the flexibility to meet children’s needs in return for accountability for meeting their promises to families and taxpayers. In order to set and meet these requirements, charter schools need an authorizer. A strong authorizer creates accountability by defining clear expectations for student outcomes, working alongside schools, families and communities to ensure they are met and driving change and improvement when schools don’t deliver on that promise. 

When accountability is at its best, it creates space for innovation. When standards for excellence are clear, schools have the freedom to assess and implement the right curriculum, staffing models and budgets in ways that creatively meet the needs of the students they serve. The result is that families have access to schools that offer and prioritize different things — from an arts focus to International Baccalaureate, language immersion or individualized learning — with the confidence that all are able to deliver high-quality outcomes.

As the president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, I interact with hundreds of charter authorizers on a regular basis. My organization has seen time and time again that a strong authorizer will have a strong accountability system, which in turn creates a greater number of students achieving at high levels and a shrinking number of kids learning below grade level. More simply put, the combination of authorizing, accountability and innovation almost always creates the results education professionals and families so desperately crave — improved student learning.

And this is not just from NACSA’s observations; it is backed up by research. A released last year by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that the majority of charter schools accelerated academic outcomes for students at impressive rates. CREDO designated more than 1,000 charter schools as “gap busters,” citing their ability to demonstrate strong results overall and close historically persistent achievement gaps. Impact like this is possible, in part, because authorizers hold and enforce high standards: saying “yes” and making it easier for students and families to access charter schools and networks with strong results, saying “no” to networks with poor results. The study described how important strong authorizing practices and accountability systems are in producing schools that can close gaps in student achievement. 

Sadly, while continues to point to the power of strong accountability in raising student outcomes, the term has for too long been associated with punishment and school closures, limiting the ability of superintendents, principals and even charter authorizers to rely on accountability measures as a tool for improving student learning. To be clear, persistently failing charter schools must be closed, and when that happens, students and families need to be equipped with the information, freedom and access necessary to select a school better suited for them. But strong accountability is so much more than that — it weaves together multiple measures of learning and success and relies on community, collaboration and access to resources as some of its core pillars.

If education advocates and practitioners could expand the understanding of this crucial lever for student achievement, it would become far easier for more schools, districts and states to truly invest in the practice of accountability.

The Virginia Board of Education took another step on Friday to clarify how schools will be rated and student performance measured to better determine how to direct state resources.

The board, on the superintendent’s recommendation, approved : “Distinguished,” “On Track,” “Off Track” and “Needs Intensive Support.”

Schools considered “distinguished” are those that exceed the state’s expectations for growth, achievement, and readiness, while “needs intensive support” schools are those that “significantly” do not meet any of the state’s expectations.

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The “on-track” and “off track” descriptors mean schools are either meeting or not meeting expectations. However, questions surfaced on where the terms came from, the benchmarks, and the descriptions behind the labels.

Under the proposed plan, Virginia will begin collecting data for the new performance framework starting in August. Results will be released during the 2025-26 school year.

Board President Grace Creasey, a Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointee, said the department will do more work to flush out the descriptions as the revision of the state’s accreditation system moves forward.

“I would like to remind us that the purpose here is transparency and understanding on behalf of not just people in schools, not just those of us sitting here in this room, not people who do education every day,” said Creasey on Friday. “This is for people to understand who are parents and families; and so while we’re deciding what the main categories are, these descriptors have yet to be fully baked at this point.”

Earlier in the process of revising the accreditation system, the board considered two different measures to track academic performance: an achievement index and an overall school rating, which raised concerns about the potential impact on low-performing schools and efforts to recruit teachers and influencing parents to seek other school choices for their children.

Since April, teachers, parents, students, and education leaders have told the board they support using category descriptions instead of an A-F rating scale.

The category descriptors are part of a larger plan by Youngkin’s administration to overhaul the existing accountability system, which focuses on accreditation and measures schools based on academic achievement, performance gaps, student attendance and graduation and dropout rates, and factors like building safety, student-teacher ratios and licensure.

Schools are then labeled accredited, accredited with conditions or not accredited.

Members of the administration and the board have criticized the current system for being vague and failing to address declines in student performance in subjects such as math and reading.

The administration’s process includes splitting up the state’s accreditation system into two parts: an accreditation system, to assess whether schools meet all requirements laid out in state laws and regulations; and an accountability system, to provide “timely and transparent information on student and school performance.”

Under the new system, schools will be rated based on students’ success, measured by their mastery of subjects and academic growth.

Stakeholders and the board are split on the weight factors totaling the overall score for each school level.

Earlier the board expressed that “mastery” is important to make sure students thoroughly understand the concepts before graduating to the next grade level. Others have urged the board to keep “mastery” and “growth” at an equal weight.

The overall score for elementary schools consists of three weight factors: 65% mastery, 25% growth, and 10% readiness.

In middle schools, the performance score is weighted 60% mastery, 20% growth and 20% readiness; high schools’ performance score is weighted 50% mastery, 35% readiness and 15% graduation.

VDOE staff said the performance descriptors would be in addition to the three federally required support and improvement identification categories: Comprehensive, Targeted and Additional Targeted. The designations are given to schools because a specific group of students may need assistance in catching up to the instruction.

Schools identified as “comprehensive” receive full federal support for the entire school, compared to “targeted” schools, which receive support for low-performing subgroups.

“This is all about providing a holistic picture to the public that’s more transparent, more clear about where schools are performing across all the indicators in the system,” said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development for All4Ed.

Last year, the department contracted with Hyslop to work on changes to the accreditation system along with Chad Aldeman, the Edunomics Lab policy director at Georgetown University.

Board member Anne Holton, former state secretary of education and an appointee of Democratic Govs. Terry McAuliffee and Ralph Northam, was the lone vote against accepting the recommendation, saying she needed more information about the descriptors.

“There are at least a dozen significant decisions, including one of the most important decisions of these ‘where the lines are going to be drawn’ that we haven’t made yet, even though we’re implementing the system starting with the school year that starts in six weeks,” Holton said.

She added that she’s concerned that the proposed accreditation system has not been “fully thought out” and will have “unintended consequences” on teachers, families and “our neediest students.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Today, as student debt bogs down millions of Americans and debates about the value of postsecondary education gain steam, college and career readiness is still important — but it no longer works as the primary measure of K-12 success. Preparation for college isn’t the goal; successfully completing a postsecondary program and landing a good-paying job is. Those who seek to improve education systems need to think longer term in their efforts to measure and enhance the effectiveness of K-12 schools.

While there has been progress in public reporting of college and career readiness metrics, very few states weight those measures heavily within their accountability systems or put longer-term outcomes at the center of their efforts to improve education. A from Education Strategy Group and American Student Assistance digs into how all 50 states are measuring and prioritizing long-term outcomes — namely, postsecondary and workforce success — by including them in their funding and accountability systems.

At the K-12 level, the report divides the range of potential long-term success measures that states could use into two main categories. 

The first is the now-familiar set of college and career readiness metrics, including the rates at which students participate and succeed in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual credit and industry-recognized credential programs. These are known to influence and be predictive of success in higher education, and states, districts and schools should unequivocally continue tracking and using them.  

But if the ultimate goal of education is to set students on a path to economic opportunity and mobility, more states need to place greater emphasis on the second major category of K-12 metrics examined in this report: postsecondary outcomes.

These capture students’ progress and success in higher education and the workforce. Specific measures in this category include enrollment in two- and four-year colleges, as well as short-term certificate or training programs; attainment of an associate or bachelor’s degree or a credential; military enlistment; employment and earnings.

A look at all 50 states reveals that far more are focused on college and career readiness than on postsecondary outcomes. Although nearly all collect and publicly report on metrics in both categories, there is a dramatic divergence when it comes to using them for formal accountability. Forty-one states and the District of Columbia include college and career readiness metrics in their accountability systems; just eight use postsecondary outcomes. 

Ideally, more states would not only feature college and career readiness data as hefty, non-negotiable components of K-12 accountability formulas, but postsecondary and workforce metrics, too. Connecticut, for instance, holds schools and districts accountable for students’ enrollment in a two- or four-year college within one year of high school graduation. The state has set a 75% target and prorates the number of points awarded to districts for accountability scoring based on the percentage of that target they achieve. Taken together, college and career readiness and postsecondary enrollment measures account for 16% of a high school’s rating in the state.

If accountability is the stick, funding is the carrot — and few states attach funding incentives to metrics in either category. Seven states provide K-12 funding based on performance on college and career readiness metrics, and only two link funding to postsecondary outcomes.

Texas is a leader in connecting financial incentives to longer-term outcomes. The state’s College, Career and Military Readiness Outcomes Bonus enables districts to earn extra funding for every student who meets certain thresholds on key measures of post-graduation success. Districts across the state can receive bonuses that range from $2,000 to $5,000 for each student who meets certain readiness criteria and enrolls in college, earns an associate degree or gains an industry-recognized credential within a year of graduation. Bonuses are higher for the success of economically disadvantaged students, encouraging districts to prioritize extra support to meet their needs. The program has already resulted in hundreds of millions of additional dollars flowing to districts across Texas. 

Long-term data on student success is also useful for consumers. Massachusetts has extensive reporting on workforce outcomes for high school graduates. The state’s publishes reports that show employment rates and average earnings for graduates of every public district and school. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education matches student records with wage data from other government agencies, giving Massachusetts residents a glimpse into how well their districts set graduates up for long-term economic success.

The examples above are encouraging, but insufficient. The majority of the country still does not put long-term economic outcomes at the center of efforts to reshape and improve education systems. Current federal accountability requirements do not necessarily encourage prioritizing of these important measures, so it’s up to states to act. If education leaders are truly committed to helping all young people find economic mobility and prosperity, it’s time to expand the vision for measuring success in K-12 education.

Through it all, we believe this post-COVID, tech-accelerated world needs a pragmatic approach to accountability, one that measures conventional academic attainment and adds critical social-emotional and career skills to the mix. Most importantly, this approach must honor the unique strengths and opportunities each community faces and ensure all its voices are heard, including students, families, teachers, administrators, and business and local leaders.

We call this approach Accountability Plus. 

Over the last three years, our organization, , has partnered with over 150 schools and districts across the United States to rethink what success means for their students. We help each district and its community — the school board, business leaders, families, staff and students — generate a unique vision for success and systems for tracking, celebrating and communicating what students have achieved.

These locally defined accountability models expand the definition of success to emphasize real-world skills like problem solving, collaboration and communication, as well as whole-child outcomes like physical, mental,and emotional well-being, while maintaining an emphasis on growth in math, reading and other academic subjects. School systems then track student progress through like performance tasks and portfolios, not just standardized tests.

Logan County Schools in Kentucky is a great example of what is possible when both state and district policies are oriented to the whole child and measure what matters. As a member of the the district has been designing and testing a local accountability model that focuses on measuring four “” — student performance, growth, readiness and well-being — through state testing, classroom observation and school climate survey data.

This model doesn’t ignore standardized test scores, but uses them as one of multiple measures. It is powerful to see communities determine what matters most and hold themselves accountable to getting there using a process that tells a more complete story.

Another example involves the Hawai’i State Public Charter School Commission. Learner-Centered Collaborative and several other consulting organizations have been engaged with a network of Hawai’ian-focused charter schools created to integrate Hawai’ian culture, language and identity.

Our engagement with these schools began with a review of their vision, mission and values to ensure clarity of purpose. From there, we helped them develop one-page that are specific to each school. Each provides a high-level overview of desired success metrics (e.g. 70% of students participate in school-provide leadership opportunities) as well as where the data will be sourced from (e.g. student surveys) and how well the school is is attaining specific outcomes (e.g. 55% of students participated in first semester).

In Hawai’i, the metrics also include a strong cultural identity,  social-emotional skills such as collaboration and adaptability, and academic measures like reading and math.

We are now creating dashboards to help educators visualize their schools’ results and brainstorm ways to improve them. 

The key is that they are not seeing tests as the sole focus of their efforts. Instead, they are emphasizing ongoing assessment and continuous improvement based on the data collected through their expanded set of metrics. This is a model that can be adapted for any community.

We and our partners are not the only ones answering the call for a pragmatic approach to accountability. Action is being taken in communities across the country where there is a clear dissatisfaction with the industrial-era model of education and its legacy accountability system. 

Getting started takes only belief in two things: that every school has the ability to listen to students and the broader community, and that it can redefine success and establish shared goals for accountability around metrics that matter.

In a recent letter, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona invited states to apply for funding for innovative, flexible accountability models. Conditions are ripe for educators, policymakers and stakeholders to collaboratively define what matters most and to develop holistic models that incorporate multiple measures of success. These honor and celebrate the many ways in which people are smart, rather than just ranking and sorting them based on narrow measures. 

It is incumbent upon everyone who has a stake in the education of young people to create new accountability models that serve the unique needs of every child. Redefining success and creating meaningful accountability frameworks can ensure that all learners know themselves, thrive in their communities and actively engage in the world as their best selves.

Current accountability systems are built on a one-size-fits-all view of student progress and are divorced from improvements in instruction and learning. 

If the goal is to make schools more effective at helping every student achieve, states should adopt a new system that puts young people at the center. Any assessment should measure what they actually learn (and, moving forward, more of what they actually do) and report it periodically to educators who can use this information to adjust their teaching. It should also ensure that schools are evaluated periodically to address factors that affect student achievement, including engagement in learning, quality of instruction and leadership, and effective use of resources. 

The purpose of student and school evaluation should be improvement. Evaluation without the intent to make schools better is a waste of time, and improvement design without the benefit of evaluation is guesswork. Specifically, a new accountability system should require:

• Data to improve student learning. Giving curriculum-aligned assessments in shorter testing periods throughout the year ensures that students are evaluated on what they learn, provides timely feedback to teachers about what aspects of the curriculum students have mastered and what they still need to know, and still produces enough cumulative data for policymakers to assess overall performance during the year. The results can be combined with other information to provide a more accurate view of a school’s performance and efforts to improve than a picture provided by overly simplistic and narrow test score rankings and ratings. The goal is to give teachers appropriate data so every child masters the subject matter.
  
•  Independent third-party evaluations. These should include looking at how a school operates to see how it can get better, searching for root causes of problems that hinder learning and suggesting what behaviors, policies and programs are needed to effect change. While third-party, independent school evaluations are common in scores of countries, most U.S. schools do not take advantage of these supports. Providers including WestED, Cognia, American Institutes of Research, Insight Education Group and Education Resources Consortium provide third-party diagnostic school reviews, focusing on , , and — factors that research has shown makes a difference in student learning. For example, since 2012, Cognia has worked with 11 state departments of education to provide feedback and data on maintaining school improvements. In just three school years (2018-22), state education agencies partnering with Cognia for diagnostic reviews of their lowest-performing schools saw that 40% in South Carolina and 69% in Kentucky were no longer on state watch lists for low performance, and 56% were not reidentified as low-performing in 2022. Third-party evaluations provide a rich, comprehensive understanding of the underlying causes of every school’s performance, which can give principals, teachers, staff and parents greater insight.
  
• Focus on continuous improvement. Current efforts to meet federal Title 1 requirements are compliance-driven exercises that fail to guide and achieve meaningful improvement. Continuous improvement is not a plan, but an embedded behavior within the culture of a school. It requires a constant focus on the conditions, processes and practices that will improve teaching and learning by regularly identifying behaviors that must be maintained and those that must change. Curriculum-based, periodic assessments can be paired with professional development from state-funded assessment hubs that can help educators use the data to achieve this goal.

Such a system changes the role and purpose of state education agencies. While they now spend an inordinate amount of time, resources and effort designing, developing and implementing annual testing programs, in this new system, they will have the responsibility to ensure that schools and districts produce expected test results and have the guidance, technical assistance, staffing and data

infrastructure they need. Further, states will work with districts to set school expectations and direction. In this way, the state moves from test administrator to district improvement partner and coach. The state should identify and offer a list of approved providers with a proven track record of effectiveness and performance for assessment, third-party evaluation and improvement. 

Local education agencies will be expected to provide their states with annual evidence of ongoing improvement, including student performance, teacher learning and family engagement. Districts and schools should also be accountable for making sure teachers and principals know how to analyze and make instructional decisions and modifications under the new system. It is not safe to assume that because the data reveal performance gaps, educators will know how to address them. 

identify an issue, develop a plan, implement strategies and evaluate student progress. This professional learning could be part of the third-party independent evaluation or state or local requirements, but there must be a plan for initial and ongoing professional learning to prepare educators to handle data that come from more frequent and targeted assessments. Such evidence will be key factors in the state accountability system.

Efforts to improve teaching and learning have stagnated. However, with an accountability system that provides schools with timely, useful information illustrating what practices are working, what behaviors need to change and what remedies can best address specific challenges, states can guide and assist efforts to improve. Assessments that are embedded in the teaching and learning process, and provide essential information to educators so they can make changes long before students advance to the next grade, can strengthen what happens in classrooms for each child.

If state leaders are serious about ensuring that every student is successful, they must change their accountability systems to do just that.

On Feb. 9, 2012, then-President Barack Obama invited chief state school officers, governors, superintendents and members of Congress to the East Room of the White House. 

Before the assembled crowd, Obama that he was granting states waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind Act (full disclosure: I worked on this project at the U.S. Department of Education and was in the audience that day). In exchange for a suite of reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations, states would be freed from NCLB’s most onerous accountability provisions. 

With the stroke of the pen, Obama waved away the notion that all schools needed to make “adequate yearly progress” for all students and for individual student groups. Instead of interventions for all children in low-performing schools, states could choose how many schools to identify for improvement and what happened there.

���䳢��’s accountability pressures had been instrumental in a decade-plus of small but significant gains. That progress was perhaps smaller than policymakers and educators might have preferred, but it was broadly shared. In eighth-grade math, for example, the lowest and highest performers both improved about 8 points  — close to a year’s worth of progress — on NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, from 2003 to 2013.

Obama’s relaxing of school and district accountability pressures helped set off a decline in student performance across the country. By the time Congress passed, and Obama signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, achievement scores had already begun to fall. 

Not only that, but the declines were uneven. From 2013 to 2019, scores for the lowest-performing 10% of students fell 7 points, versus a gain of 3 points for students at the higher end. The response to COVID-19 would eventually widen the gap even further, but it had been growing well before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus.

Today, achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. Overall, 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade. To help visualize how these disparities are changing within individual states and cities, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, to create the interactive tool below. Click to find the results for your state or city. 

NAEP Math Scores

Select a state or city below for detailed information

National AverageAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCalifornia-Los Angeles, CA-San Diego, CADistrict of ColumbiaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaDoDEAFloridaGeorgia-Atlanta, GAHawaiiIdahoIllinois-Chicago, ILIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusetts-Boston, MAMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew York-New York City, NYNorth Carolina-Charlotte, NCNorth DakotaOhio-Cleveland, OHOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexas-Houston, TXUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Change in 8th grade math scores 2003 - 2013 2013 - 2022 2013 - 2022

• All Students
• Higher Performing Students
• Lower Performing Students

We chose to focus on eighth-grade math for this exercise because early math skills are to long-term life outcomes. However, similar achievement trends are in other grades and subjects as well. For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has  the same growing achievement gaps in reading, history and civics.  

What’s behind the decline? 

A primary factor is the softening of NCLB. The law may not have been especially popular, but at least part of the gains from that era were to its school and district accountability systems. When researchers evaluated the effects of NCLB, they found the law led to noticeable gains in math, for the lowest-performing students. When schools felt pressure from state accountability systems, they increased their academic standards and boosted achievement in ways that had for students. 

New York City provides an illustrative example of what happens when accountability pressure goes away. Under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city instituted an A-F school rating system in 2007. Research found that the system student achievement, in F-rated schools. But in 2014, the city abandoned that grading system and the previous gains . 

New York City’s NAEP scores show similar trends. All students made large gains from 2003 to 2013, but the lines diverge after that. While the city’s higher-performing students continued to improve, the scores of lower performers fell 10 points over the last decade. 

There are plenty of other potential theories explaining these trends beyond accountability, but they don’t fully align with the timing, scope or magnitude of the declines. In 2019, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli looked into the “lost decade” and suggested it could be due to economic factors, screens and other technology or a shift away from basic skills. Others, including and the Pioneer Institute’s , blamed the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. 

Economic factors could certainly play a role. Petrilli is right to note that and periods of rising are bad for kids, especially the most disadvantaged ones. Plus, the Great Recession of 2007-09 did set off a wave of austerity in some states. Given what about how education spending boosts student performance, particularly among low-income students, this feels plausible. 

However, the timing isn’t right. The economic recovery throughout the 2010s and rise in education spending should have augured well for student performance. Yet, the opposite was happening as achievement fell and gaps grew.

The economic argument also doesn’t explain the scope of the declines. While achievement was falling, 47 of 50 states were their inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending. Washington state, for example, increased its spending by 38% over this time period, but its achievement scores fell more than the national average and its achievement gap widened. It’s possible the losses would have been worse if not for the new money, but something else had to be driving the decline. 

The same flaws apply to arguments around the Common Core. If disruptions associated with the shift to the Common Core were the cause, the scores should have rebounded over time. But they didn’t. 

It’s also possible that the Common Core pushed schools to cover different topics in a different order, but that doesn’t explain why achievement gaps grew even in non-Common Core states such as Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, or why the same patterns appear in civics and history, which the Common Core did not address. 

What about technology? Screens have become more pervasive at home and in schools, and kids are reading for fun less often than they used to. Psychologist Jean Twenge has 2012 — the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone — as the beginning of a noticeable decrease in teen mental health. 

That timing lines up with the achievement declines, but it’s not quite clear why the technology problem would hit children in the U.S. harder than in other places. And yet, achievement gaps in math and science for both fourth and eighth graders faster here in America than in any other country (and they were already quite wide here). We have a unique achievement gap problem.

These trends are sobering, but there is one hopeful lesson here: Holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working — until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it. It may be time once again to ask schools to focus on the academic achievement of their lowest-performing students. 

It’s time to identify, understand and discuss the under-the-radar issues that are hindering student success and revisit practices that could help solve four of the most critical. Addressing them now can help improve student outcomes for years to come.

There are learning barriers ed tech cannot break through. When children in historically marginalized and under-resourced communities walk into the classroom, many are already steps behind their peers. For families who struggled to meet basic needs before COVID, the pandemic only exacerbated the difficulties they faced, including homelessness, food insecurity and a lack of affordable child care. Four years later, many children have yet to feel , which has increased academic disengagement, chronic absenteeism and learning loss, especially in economically challenged areas.

But when schools offer a learning environment that like bright lights and loud noises, and teachers focus on self-regulation, trust and empathy as much as they do on math and reading, children are better able to navigate and focus on learning. Even one stable and committed relationship with a trusted adult . The more supportive the classroom, the less likely students are to show , the primary stress hormone.

Professional development is failing to address a key factor in student success. Each year, school districts invest millions in professional development. However, , especially for educators working with English learners and students with disabilities. There’s that professional development strongly correlates with student achievement.

Instead of focusing their training budgets on current trends, districts can offer professional learning and evidence-based coaching centered on fostering meaningful interactions to build the teacher-student bond and close achievement gaps. This is particularly where educators lack the support and resources to focus on interactions that build vital social-emotional learning skills.

When teachers’ powers of observation are strengthened, and they cultivate the skills to respond appropriately to each student’s needs, they build healthy bonds that help children feel safe and secure. For instance, a by the U.S. Department of Education found that ongoing, evidence-based, one-to-one coaching helps educators boost student achievement. This is especially true for teachers with less than five years’ experience and those with weak instructional practices. These in literacy, vocabulary and self-control.

Accountability systems aren’t measuring the most important elements of students’ experiences. One notable example comes from early childhood education, where almost every state has its own Quality Rating and Improvement System — and each measures success differently. Some look only at factors related to the learning environment, such as the number of books in a classroom or assurances that safety measures are in place.

Accountability systems can dig deeper by using interactions as the key indicator of whether the school is delivering the best outcomes. By classifying and measuring educator-child interactions across three domains — emotional support, instructional support and classroom organization — states can gain the information needed to guide focused, ongoing improvement that . 

In Louisiana, where lacked critical kindergarten skills, the state set its sights on an interactions-based model that can both provide essential accountability data and identify areas for student improvement. Through the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, the state helped teachers identify where they struggled and provided personalized guidance and professional development aligned with their needs. As a result, Louisiana tripled the number of sites with the highest performance rating on its quality measurement scale.

Development of critical skills is sacrificed for standardized testing. While there continue to be calls to reform standardized testing, districts are under mounting pressure to demonstrate student progress post-pandemic. Clearly, a focus on math, science and reading is warranted, but educators must also make space for core skills needed for success in school and in life. These include the : critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, communication and citizenship. Equipped with these tools, students can think more deeply about their experiences, learn from others and engage in civil discourse with their peers.

Play-based, project-based and deep learning allows students to dive into different concepts and creatively apply their knowledge to real-world issues. In addition, educators are able to connect with curious students through their interests, observe their actions and formulate open-ended questions around them, helping build that critical educator-child bond. Countless studies demonstrate the of investment in these core skills as they return strong academic outcomes, attendance, school engagement and behavior.

Amid all the cutting-edge solutions that are capturing attention, it is important not to lose sight of the proven power of life-changing interactions between teachers and their students. Ed tech resources are powerful tools, but they can’t replace the impact of supportive relationships. Teachers must have the training and resources that make them possible.

Four of 10 seats on a new finance advisory committee will be filled by community members, starting in a few weeks — the first time the public has been given a formal role in fiscal oversight. In an effort to recruit new voices, priority will be given to people who have not previously volunteered with district governance but have ties to schools and some knowledge of finance. Three school board members and three district executives, including Superintendent Joe Gothard, will round out the committee. 

Over the summer, as the school board considered the current $1 billion budget, community opposition to some cuts convinced district leaders that as public as had been, even more outside participation was needed. 

St. Paul Public Schools is one of the most diverse in Minnesota, serving one-fourth of the state’s English learners, with concentrations of Southeast Asian and East African students. Less familiar populations, including Karen, Burmese and Bhutanese families, are also expected to grow. When the district first started planning to address the pandemic’s learning losses, leaders knew that the demographics meant schools would need numerous strategies. To identify them, they tapped dozens of community organizations.

When the federal aid started flowing, trying to both incorporate feedback from so many groups and speed up the hidebound bureaucracy that keeps money moving seemed impossibly daunting, says Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s executive chief of equity, strategy and innovation.

But finding time for community input is already yielding dividends in making the system more nimble and assuring that limited funds are spent on students’ most pressing issues. Instead of waiting for multi-year evaluations, looking at early evidence can help leaders decide whether to put more energy or money into an initiative.  

“We’ve got to continue to coalesce around student learning needs,” Akyea says. “Everything else really needs to be able to shift according to what we need to be able to do to do what is best for our students.”

To this end, a year ago district leaders created a series of dashboards tracking, in real time, key information about each of the dozens of strategies initially adopted. As they began using the data to make decisions much more quickly than usual, they shared them publicly. They hoped to help the public understand, by sharing evidence of where change is needed, why some programs got boosts while others were cut. 

The effort drew national and local attention from the U.S. Department of Education, which invited district leaders to present their work at a webinar for other districts; from the Council of Great City Schools; and, most recently, from the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, in naming Gothard the newest superintendent of the year.

Whatever ultimately ends up in the budget to be approved next June, school board members will have to justify their choices to the public. Better, say district leaders, to start those conversations now. 

Case in point: The relief aid allowed the district to test new strategies for closing longstanding racial and socioeconomic academic gaps. Funding those that turned out to be seems like an obvious priority. Yet new concerns have surfaced in the years since in-person schools were shuttered. 

Chronic absenteeism and student safety are much bigger community concerns now, for example, than they were in 2020. After schools reopened for in-person instruction, it became clear that giving older students passes for public transit, now plagued by rising crime, wasn’t as likely to get them to school as it had been. So St. Paul used some of the aid to raise driver pay so it could reinstitute school bus routes.

“We did some student surveys last spring after a lot of tragic incidents in and around our schools,” says Innovation Office Director Leah Corey, one of the district leaders who created the dashboards tracking how well pandemic interventions have worked. “Yellow buses came up a lot as something that students and parents missed. They thought they would be safer and be more on time and more accountable to get to and from school if they had a yellow bus.”

Khulia Pringle, the National Parents Union’s Minnesota state director, has applied to join the committee. If she is chosen, she says, she will also raise safety issues. The parents she works with want more orderly schools, she says, but believe that would better be accomplished by increasing the number of community groups with a presence in schools than by reviving contracts with local police.

As painful as these choices sound, St. Paul may hit fewer speedbumps navigating them than other large school systems.

Right now, administrators everywhere are taking their first painful steps toward creating budgets for the 2024-25 academic year. For many, this means finally confronting the so-called fiscal cliff, a precipice that education finance experts warned of three years ago when Congress approved $190 billion in recovery aid. Now, with federal funds , these districts are figuring out who to manage with dramatically reduced funding. 

Lawmakers and finance experts had hoped much of the aid would be used to from pandemic learning losses, but many school systems instead used it to plug pre-existing budget gaps. Frequently, the mounting deficits were caused by years of falling enrollment driven by declining birth rates. 

Compounding the crisis, a record number of families moved their children out of district schools during COVID, accelerating the need for painful structural changes. Instead of helping their remaining students rebound, lots of districts spent relief funds staving off unpopular decisions such as closing schools and laying off staff.

Between the start of the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, St. Paul Public Schools lost 10% of its students, accelerating a trend decades in the making and projected to continue. Operating a large number of drastically underenrolled schools, in fall 2021 the board decided to close several and consolidate others.

The move allowed the district to spend most of its $319 million share of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund on strategies tied directly to meeting students’ needs. With an aim of pushing the system to respond more nimbly to internal data showing what’s working and what isn’t, district leaders created a public dashboard for each expenditure outlining its goal and tracking progress. 

That information should help the new committee be strategic in considering what recommendations to prioritize in 2024-25.

For example, the panel will likely be asked to consider continuing a program that put 105 literacy specialists in elementary and middle schools to work with small groups of struggling students. In addition to allowing the district to retain highly effective educators even as it closed buildings, the effort — known as What I Need Now — quickly started to boost reading rates. 

Test data show that the more than 4,000 kids in the program are learning to read more quickly than their peers. The district is nowhere near catching everyone up, however. After an initial dip at the start of the pandemic, reading proficiency rates on annual state exams have stabilized — around 35%.

District leaders are working to extend the program, which will cost an estimated $12 million during the current school year, from elementary to middle grades. They have also instituted a parallel effort in math, training teachers to use data and higher quality instruction in schools where students are struggling.

The district has also had success addressing labor shortages. St. Paul spent $4.6 million in pandemic money creating a team to recruit and retain teachers, administrators and paraprofessionals of color and in areas where job openings are particularly hard to fill. Among many strategies, the new staff has traveled to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, made on-the-spot offers at job fairs and — a rarity in Minnesota — used hiring bonuses to help fill vacancies. 

The investment appears to be paying off. Over the summer, as neighboring districts struggled to retain educators of students with disabilities, St. Paul offered $10,000 signing bonuses to special education teachers, filling 70 vacancies in short order. Of the nearly 750 staff hired during that time, half were teachers.

The new finance committee is expected to meet four to six times a year.

Do you remember being graded on a curve in school? As students, we often welcomed this approach to learning because it was much easier. We didn’t have to excel and achieve proficiency; we just needed to not do as poorly as our peers. This relative scoring measures you against others, rather than an objective standard. Let’s run with this for a moment and see how America’s schools stack up compared to other countries.

During the 1960s, scholars designed a methodology by which educational systems in different countries could be compared to one another. This ultimately led to the creation of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which in 1967 conducted the first large-scale international study to assess how well students in twelve leading countries fared in mathematics.

The United States of America came in eleventh place out of twelve — Germany, France, Japan, England, and others all scored higher. As the Washington Post wrote at the time, the United

States’ “poor showing … did not surprise the experts” because “teachers here are not as well trained, and that neither American students nor the society at large places as much value on mathematics achievement as do many countries abroad.”

Of course, that has since changed. Schools have been heavily pushing STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math — with “increasing attention over the past decade with calls both for greater emphasis on these fields and for improvements in the quality of curricula and instruction.” Since the absurdly-named No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, the federal government has required regular testing in math, giving it greater attention even in elementary school. And most states require at least two years of courses just in that subject. Suffice it to say, there’s been a lot of attention on the topic throughout K-12 education. Has it been enough to pull the country’s scores out of its comparative mediocrity?

In a word, no. The international academic rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluate 15-year-olds in 79 different countries to create a comparative score. The latest rankings place the US thirty-sixth among these countries in math with mediocre scores in the other tested subjects. This performance has remained fairly consistent since the first PISA assessment in 2000. As one education researcher noted, “What surprises me is how stable US performance is. The scores have always been mediocre.” Compared only against the United States’ largest economic competitors, the country ranks dead last.

Surely investing more resources will help, right? Wrong. As of 2018, American taxpayers were compelled to spend an average of $14,400 for every student in elementary and secondary education, an amount that is 34 percent higher than the average spent by other countries in the PISA assessment. (The amount spent on American students for higher education is $35,100 — double the average of other countries.) More money does not equate to better performance. To back up that point further, consider the recent trend of education spending in the United States alone. Since 1970, “the inflation-adjusted cost of sending a student all the way through the K-12 system has almost tripled while test scores near the end of high school remain largely unchanged. Put another way, per-pupil spending and achievement are not obviously correlated.” Indeed, while standardized test scores have remained mostly flat or have declined, spending has skyrocketed.

The money definitely isn’t going toward hiring more or better teachers. Despite the massive increase in spending on a per-student basis in recent decades, average teacher salaries have only increased by 8 percent during that entire time.11 Since 2000, there has been an approximate 8 percent increase in the number of students and teachers — but a 37 percent increase in principals and assistant principals and an 88 percent increase in administrative staff. American taxpayers now spend a sum exceeding a trillion dollars on schooling. The K-12 school system is flush with cash and flushing cash.

And the number keeps going up as education outcomes continue to go down. While $14,400 was spent on average per student in 2018, as of 2020 that amount has increased to $16,000. (Keep in mind that this is the average; in some areas, government schools spend well over $30,000 per student.) And in the wake of COVID-19 bailouts pumping nearly $200 billion into the school system, that number is likely far higher.

The school system is bloated with employed adults whose activities have little to no impact on educational outcomes of students. This problem is often made worse when considering how difficult it sometimes is to fire bad teachers. In 2015, the New York State School Boards Association reported that firing a teacher takes on average 830 days and costs $313,000 — that is students being “taught” for over two school years by an adult who shouldn’t be a teacher. In New York City proper, over the course of an entire decade, the largest school district in the country fired only a dozen teachers due to incompetence. The problems continue:

“Some teachers who can’t be fired due to the highly restrictive teacher union contracts are assigned to ‘Temporary Reassignment Centers.’ In 2009, more than 600 New York City teachers reported to the Temporary Reassignment Centers dubbed ‘Rubber Rooms.’ Important to note, these ‘teachers’ received their full salary as well as retirement contributions and accumulation of seniority.”

Here’s the takeaway: the public school system has become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for children.

I was buzzing through my chest congestion (thanks to Chicago November weather and workaholism), because I’d come to his office fresh from a visit to what seemed like an exemplary bilingual elementary campus. 

After we sat down — ostensibly to talk about early education policy — I mentioned the school’s stirring atmosphere and vibrant decorations. “It’s just obviously a great school,” I gushed. 

But Regenstein, as a local, knew a little about the school, and had a question: “How’s their data look? Is that atmosphere showing up in better results for kids?” Whatever its flaws, he said, No Child Left Behind was a response to people walking onto campuses that seemed pretty nice … even if there wasn’t a lot of learning going on. And, perhaps predictably, this particular school’s academic outcomes were dismal. 

The rest of our conversation that day stemmed from that branch — what constitutes a great school? Can any of those elements be measured? How can the measurements we choose nudge schools into better, fairer behavior that advances student excellence? 

In the intervening decade, Regenstein and I have never really stopped that discussion. Our relationship has been almost entirely built around a progressive exploration of that one big conversation. Over the years, our conversations prompted me to write a few articles exploring how education reform could, well, reform itself and advance a better, more comprehensive theory of action for pursuing educational equity. 

Leave it to Regenstein to write an entire book, , which he published with Rowman & Littlefield this fall. Early in the book, he writes that the goal is to “surface some of the hidden assumptions that are built into the current system and the ‘invisible boxes’ that constrain our current thinking.” After years — decades, really — of largely-unchanged reform thinking on testing, school choice and teacher policies, Regenstein explores how reformers and their critics might improve their debates and make some substantive progress for kids. 

After reading it, like so many other times since that first Chicago meeting, I chatted with Regenstein recently about the future of American education policy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: First, I want to clarify terms. This is a book about updating and refreshing education policy thinking … can you help us get clear on what you mean by ‘education reform?’ When did the last wave of reform start, and how did it, uh, happen? 

Eliott Regenstein: I use ‘ed reform’ to mean pushing for things to be different and better. So I think of K–12 reformers not as a category of people opposed to some other set of people in the education space, but as people engaged in an ongoing process of trying to learn and get better and do things that are going to help children in ways that we’re not currently doing. 

Sure — that’s sort of the dictionary definition version of ‘reform,’ but there is a real thing right now called ‘education reform’ that has existed in a coherent sense, and that the book is at least in part a refinement of that intellectual tradition. And I’m curious about where you clock the history on that? Where is that reform from? Why was ed reform? What was ed reform?

Sure. That wave of reform really defined my early career. It was an interesting product of a number of centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans who had similar ideas about the role of the state, and the importance of student achievement. 

For a couple of decades, that consensus held against the extremes, and there were some good reasons that it did. One of them is that education is an issue that doesn’t neatly track with the political parties. It’s just not that big a deal at the federal level. Almost no one in the federal government is there primarily because of education — outside of the Department of Education itself. That made it easier to forge consensus.

Also, in that era, the politics of state government, while ideological, were less nationalized than they are now right, with governors who were really trying to govern. Sometimes that would require, would permit, them to bring together leaders from multiple sectors, like the business community, the teachers unions, school management officials and such. Then they’d really try to come up with policies that reflected the consensus best thinking and a recognition that schools could do better.

During that period (roughly the late 1990s through the mid-2010s), I came to see the reform movement both as extremely powerful and thoughtful, but also as having some very real blind spots. 

And those blind spots have — to mix metaphors, I guess — taken a lot of the steam out of that movement, no? Reformers have run into real opposition from a lot of folks in education. 

Well, it’s worth saying that me coming from Illinois matters here. The Illinois Education Association has a history of collaborative engagement and working with the reform community and saying, ‘Look, you have identified real problems and we want to be at the table crafting real solutions.’

A good friend from the IEA who really shaped my thinking in this book told me early on, ‘Look, all these reformers write books with interesting ideas. But then, at some point, they blame all the problems on the teachers unions, and that means I can’t share it with my friends.’ 

So I wanted to write a book that is clearly not teachers union orthodoxy, but that a union leader could read and say, ‘OK, I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s not attacking me, and I can engage with these ideas.’ 

I don’t see reformers and teachers unions as being on opposite sides. I see them both working toward improved outcomes for kids, and sharing some values, whatever their disagreements. So I hoped to identify some places where they might have common values that could lead to common change efforts in ways that they themselves have not yet articulated.

It is really hard to engage in reform, even when the teachers involved desperately want it to succeed. Hoping to succeed at reform when the teachers involved don’t want it to succeed is pure folly, a recipe for failure.

How did you pick the three themes for the book? I’m on record arguing that reformers have long been too narrow. We know more or less what reformers want to do on testing, school choice and school accountability. But there’s not been anything like a reform consensus on, say, bilingual education, school integration, pre-K, housing policy, most pedagogical questions and more. I think my argument — reformers should be broader — is in tension with your push to get them to rethink accountability, teacher pay and school choice, no?

Well, first, I am not a curriculum and instruction expert, nor am I an expert on how to develop community schools. Those are incredibly important things, and there are a lot of good books about them. But I wanted to focus as a policy writer on topics where I felt like policy was driving the wrong behaviors, and where changes in policy could lead to better behavior. So my argument is not that these topics [accountability, teacher pay and school choice] are the only important topics. They’re not. My argument is that these are important topics where policy can make a difference, and that’s why I focused on those three areas.

Right. They’re structures that are amenable to policy changes — and that changes in those areas can shift responsibility, agency, and (hopefully?) behavior. But how do you balance the real goal of changing structures and incentives to nudge educators and schools to work more equitably against the real need to give educators, local and state leaders, etc enough flexibility that they can actually feel ownership over their choices … and authentically lead?

The thing about both the federal government and states and communities is that you are constantly balancing trust and distrust. This is a big theme of the book, and in the aggregate you have to trust states to do certain things, knowing that some of them will do things that you do not like, but that in fact represent the will of the voters in those states, and the reality is that on some of these issues there is no clear right or wrong, moral or immoral answer; and that, allowing states the flexibility to try some different things might actually teach us something.

What’s the future of testing and accountability? Do they have a future? Can they still serve to push schools towards fairness?

A lot of it boils down to the question of what makes a great school, and that’s a question that I try to attack frontally. Historically, we’ve focused on schools where kids came from wealthy families who would likely have been successful, regardless of how good the teachers were. And yet, some of the best work by teachers is being done in low-income communities with students who need a lot of help: Our measurement of school quality — measuring academic proficiency on tests — was just obscuring it. So I really want us to get to a more honest appraisal of which schools are doing well and encouraging more to do well.

You used early childhood education as a foil in the book. What are some of the key things K–12 policymakers and educators can learn from early ed?

There is a lot that’s different about early childhood than K–12. And in some ways, those of us who work on early childhood policy benefit from the experience of working in an unbuilt system. In early childhood some relatively basic building blocks don’t exist, and the idea of designing them is in many ways much easier than taking a built K–12 infrastructure and reshaping it after years and years of calcification. 

For example: in early childhood, children are not obligated to show up, and schools are not generally obligated to take them. And anywhere other than D.C., there probably wouldn’t be enough spots to take all the kids who might show up. Those are a fundamentally different set of starting assumptions than K–12, where families are required to send — and the schools are obligated to take — everybody.

That shapes parental choice in meaningful ways. In early education, there’s a recognition that parents need support in making choices about where to send their child, especially because the options are so varied. They don’t always get all the help they need, but that navigational function is seen as a core value. 

It’s also the case that it is a world without standardized test results, so if you are going to measure quality, it’s going to have to focus on process more than results, because the science of getting standardized results about 3- and 4-year-old children just looks really different than it does for high school kids. That makes it intuitive for early educators to focus on things like social and emotional learning, for instance. 

That’s not to say that K–12 is wrong to do the things it does. But I’m trying to think about gleaning the best of both worlds, where we draw some of the lessons from early childhood to influence the built system of K–12 while simultaneously building an early childhood system that maintains the best values of early childhood and helps import them into that K–12 system.

I particularly appreciated your treatment of standardized testing. Tests get blamed a lot for choices that schools and teachers make, even when those are actually ineffective choices like test prep. But those bad choices aren’t the tests’ fault — ! 

Standardized testing ended up in the reform deal because there was a belief in many quarters that there were certain kids, particularly low-income kids and kids of color, who, if you weren’t watching their outcomes, would just sort of drift aimlessly away, and that the system would say those kids are doing fine when they were not. That value attached to standardized tests is a real one.

But it is also the case that having standardized testing count for so much in the evaluation of schools has led to a whole set of completely understandable behaviors on the part of those schools that are not actually good for a kid’s education. You don’t see that as much with kids from wealthy families, who are going to pass the test regardless, but you do see it in places where there are lots of kids who are close but need some help to pass the test. 

Often those schools think, ‘Oh, if we focus on this test, we can get them across the line,’ and sometimes they use good pedagogy to do it, and sometimes they don’t. That’s a capacity problem that policymakers are ill suited to solving. 

So if you get rid of standardized tests, there is a very real risk that a certain population of kids are going to be very badly served, and if you make standardized tests the end-all and be-all, you’re going to get some of the bad behaviors that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades.

That problem is real, that tension between tests’ value and their distorting effect is real. Essentially, my argument is: Look, you can’t get rid of that tension, but you can build around it and create counterweights and other things that are valued. 

While they’re waiting for their copies of the book to arrive, what can folks do to usher in a brighter, more constructive version of education reform? 

Honestly, one of my dreams for this book was that people would read it and write articles disagreeing with it, and that I would then email those people politely, and then I would have a conversation with them, and that we would both learn something. I mean, I do that to people —

Can confirm. You’ve sent me those notes. 

I mean, it  would be a thrill right if someone wrote me: “Here’s where I disagree with Education Restated. 

But look, part of why I wrote this book was for reformers to read it and think, ‘OK, I recognize this. This speaks to me and my values and orientation. But I learned something. I see things differently now.” 

Even if folks aren’t entirely persuaded by my specific arguments, hopefully they come away open minded about topics that they thought they had a settled position on. The goal is to move people out of their trenches and into a conversation about what is possible. If anybody reads this and has that experience, I will consider that a success. 

The book does have that vibe. It feels like a chance to rethink reform without abandoning it.

Well, my experience has been that it is extremely rare to change people’s minds about what they want. What you can change people’s minds about is how they’re going to act on what they want. And that part of what this book is meant to do is say to both reformers and reform skeptics, ‘Look, you’re gonna want what you want, but given what you want, maybe there are different policies you could adopt that would help you achieve what you want and make common cause with people who you haven’t always thought of as your people.’

Critchfield has served on the Idaho State Board of Education for seven years, two of them as president. She also spent several years as a substitute teacher, and served on the rural Cassia County school board for 10 years.

Idaho, while a deep red state politically, is undergoing dramatic change as newcomers arrive in unprecedented numbers, many of them from the West Coast, where the political climate is decidedly different. This makes Idaho an interesting national case study, especially as a new state superintendent takes office, with strong ideas about strengthening her department’s support and oversight of school districts.

Under the Ybarra regime, districts reported receiving little of either support or oversight. As a result, they tended to ignore state mandates. Idaho EdNews assiduously tracked these departmental oversight failures, and districts’ flouting of state regulations.

During the former state chief’s tenure, districts , and ignored the state’s . Test scores stagnated, and Ybarra  

Ybarra, who took a job as earlier this month, defended her record during the campaign, saying state graduation rates and college and career readiness.

Critchfield, who was sworn into her four-year term Jan. 6, is pledging a new day. 

Idaho has long been a state where the concept of local control of public education is sacrosanct, where parental choice is seen as a top value and where public charter schools have proliferated and thrived.

How does Critchfield envision her new role, and the Idaho Department of Education’s place in the state’s education ecosystem? What lessons can Idaho teach the rest of the country? I recently interviewed Critchfield to get her perspective on these issues. 

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What do you plan to change about how the State Department of Education operated under your predecessor?

Debbie Critchfield: Literally everything. The transparency piece is huge. And earning and deserving the respect and trust of our districts and our legislature. We have to reestablish trust around education. There are things that I believe need to happen immediately. The Department of Education is an agency designed to support schools. We need to demonstrate that we do provide that service. I’m looking at standing up some regional support centers around the state so that our folks in the most rural parts of the state and anywhere in the state aren’t dependent upon trying to contact someone in Boise.

What are some of the key issues you want to address early in your term?

I’m a big believer in the science of reading, and I believe that has been pushed to the side, and we in Idaho have not acknowledged sufficiently what it does for kids. You can expect to see that as a main point of conversation when we talk about literacy. Looking at our math scores, we’re no better than most states. I will want to work with our State Board of Education on a major math initiative. I’ve signaled to those folks that that’s a conversation that they can expect.

And then there is the workforce piece. We at the state, as well as local boards and districts, need to be initiating conversations with their community businesses and industries. One of the biggest services that we can do for our students is providing that connection — how what I’m learning in class translates to the outside world. 

I talk to people in schools and districts frequently who are interested in having us help build these types of relationships and programs for their students. They’re not sure how to go about it. Fortunately, there are lots of models out there to draw from.

What made you decide to run for the state superintendent position?

Well, there were two things, actually. First, the COVID experience really highlighted the missed opportunities that Idaho didn’t move on. We had this interesting time in education where everything, all these state and federal laws, rules, requirements, etc. were waived. That created so many opportunities to try new things. But it felt like many of the educational leaders at the state level just kind of held their breath and then it was like, “Oh, OK, COVID’s over, let’s go back to business. Let’s go back to how things were.”

So that’s the first thing that motivated me. A frustration with the lack of vision, the lack of leadership. There was this tremendous opportunity to reimagine and create a system wrapped around what is most valuable for kids. Public education is in many ways still based on an 1850s model. There are some things that still work, and many that don’t. I felt frustration over the missed opportunity.

Second, I also felt frustrated with our lack of progress. We’re moving, but is it forward and is it towards the outcomes and the goals that we have for our kids? What are we preparing our kids to know and be able to do? Having been on the State Board of Education for the past eight years, I had a front row seat. And it became clear to me that I was doing as much as I could as an appointed volunteer. I needed to change roles to really advance some of the things that I heard from communities, parents, students and teachers.

What did you say on the campaign trail that resonated with voters and allowed you to defeat a well-known incumbent?

I would ask people all the time: Can you tell me what the vision is for K-12 education in Idaho? And every group I spoke to, whether it was business leaders, parents, teachers, they’d all look at each other and just shrug. No one knew. I didn’t know. And I’ve been in a position where I should know. No one knew because there was no vision. 

So then I could tell people here’s my plan, my vision. We’ve got to prepare our kids for the jobs and opportunities of a growing state. To me, this means providing a meaningful experience for high school students, and making sure that they’re prepared at the earliest levels. Providing fundamentals of reading and math for our very earliest learners, to make sure that by the time they hit high school, they’re prepared for that next thing, which to me is less about seat time and more about the application of knowledge. I’m a big fan of any type of work-based learning, project-based learning. internships, apprenticeships, particularly for juniors and seniors.

Those seemed like basic, educational, non-political messages, and they resonated.

Idaho has been stagnant or moving backwards for years in what locally is called the go-on rate, the percentage of high school students who go on to some kind of post-secondary opportunity. The rate for the most recent year was just 37%. That might be in part because of the disconnect between schools and workforce experiences. How do you plan to address that?

 I like to reference two numbers together because I believe they tell an interesting story. First of all, the go-on rate is not a perfect measure because it does not capture everything. It misses, for example, military service. But having said that, it is a data point we have to work with, 37%. But at the same time, 80% of graduating high school seniors have taken at least one dual credit class (high school and college credit).

When I look at those numbers side by side, what it tells me is that students want to jumpstart their future. They want the ability to learn from things that are going to benefit them from outside of high school. There are a lot of opportunities that we are not bringing into the schools, that would indicate to a student that there are a lot of ways that you can be prepared for life after school, and to have early access to things that you’re interested in. That may not always look like college.

For the past eight years, the Department of Education has not fulfilled its accountability role. How do you turn that culture around?

It is going to be a process. Over the past few years, local control became this pat answer, and a cover for a lack of leadership. When our districts asked for support with something, they’d often hear, “Oh, sorry, that’s a local control issue.” Local decision-making the way I define it does not mean being left alone. 

I celebrate local decision-making. But how about if I help you look at and have access to all the best information that’s out there? So before you choose curriculum, which is your decision, and I don’t look to change that, why don’t I offer you some information that might help you make a decision? Did you know that there are several factors that you could consider before you decide? Did you know that these other districts are having success with this particular curriculum?

I’ve heard all over the state that districts have really felt left alone, they feel as though they’re in silos and it really has been every man for himself. Again, it’s under that guise of, “Oh, sorry, local control, can’t help you.” I don’t accept that.

What’s your view of the impact charter schools have had on Idaho public education?

I think there are missed opportunities here. What I mean by that is that we have charter schools that are doing incredible things across the state, and these are things that district-run public schools can do as well. But here’s a real disconnect. I hear about this not just from parents, but from people involved in education. “Well, they’re a charter so they get to design their start and stop times and they get to design the projects that they do.” And I tell them: so do you. You get to do that same thing. 

I believe I can do a lot of matchmaking between innovative charters and district schools. But we have to break down some of the misconceptions, that charters aren’t public schools, and they are not held to the same if not higher standards of accountability.

Finally, what makes Idaho a special place that other states might want to look to for ideas and inspiration?

We’re geographically spread out and diverse in our communities in a number of ways. But statewide we’re talking just over 300,000 students. That gives us the ability to really impact and effect change quickly. We don’t have to wait five or 10 years to really see the result of the work that we’re doing. That’s something that I believe makes Idaho unique. We’ve just lacked the leadership to make it happen.

I have written before in these pages about the importance of accurate and balanced methods of measuring school quality. In the same spirit, I recommend a new book by Steve Rees and Jill Wynns, . 

Wynns spent 24 years on the San Francisco school board, while Rees spent just as long running a company that helped school districts measure and report on the quality of their schools. Both have seen their share of mistakes, many of which lead to real pain: teachers reassigned and principals removed based on faulty data; English learners held back from entering the mainstream academic program even after they have become fluent; charter schools closed due to inadequate measurement of growth; even students denied graduation based on flawed interpretation of test results.

Rees and Wynns have now authored a highly readable guide that superintendents, principals, school board members, education reporters, teachers, and advocates can use to avoid these kinds of errors. They underline four flaws that are most common:

Growth v. Proficiency

The first is using children’s current test scores — rather than a measure of their academic growth — to judge the quality of schools and teachers. In high poverty schools, students often arrive several years behind grade level. Few of them are “proficient” in math or reading. But too often states and districts give greatest weight to students’ current test scores, not their rate of improvement. 

Consider a middle school whose sixth grade students arrived three years behind grade level. If they are only one year behind grade level at the end of sixth grade, that would be spectacular progress. But in California, to use but one example, the school’s academic score would be in one of the two lowest categories.

Apples v. Oranges 

The second major flaw Rees and Wynns point out is related: when trying to measure academic growth, some states and districts fail to measure the same students over time. Instead, they measure a school or grade level’s average over time. But in a middle school, a third of the students each year are new arrivals, and another third from last year have departed. In four-year high schools, a quarter leave each year, another quarter arrive.  So annual school or grade level averages are measuring different kids.

The solution is obvious: Measure the same cohort of students over time, following them from one grade level to the next. Even better, remove from your measure students who have departed or recently arrived at the school.

Ignoring the Imprecision of Test Results

The third common flaw is failure to acknowledge the imprecision of test scores. “When we test kids, we’re trying to gather evidence of something that exists out of sight, somewhere between their ears,” Rees and Wynns write. “Whatever their test scores reveal, it can only be an estimate of what they know.”

Standardized tests are often used to rate children—typically into four categories, which might be summarized as advanced, proficient, needing improvement, and far behind grade level. But imprecision means some of these classifications are dubious. “The major test publishers include what they call classification error rates in their technical manuals,” the authors explain. “It is common to find a 25–30 percent classification error rate in the middle bands of a range of test scores—and that’s for a standardized assessment with 45–65 questions.”

“In Texas, Illinois, Maryland, California, Ohio, Indiana, Florida and many other states,” they add, “the parent reports make no mention of imprecision.” Yet these reports tell parents whether a child is on grade level. Some states use a standardized test called the Smarter Balance Assessment. Its “technical manual reveals that the classification accuracy rate in these middle two bands (Levels 2 and 3) is about 70 percent. In other words, just seven out of every 10 kids whose scores land in the middle two bands will be classified correctly as having either met the standard or scored below the standard.”  

Lack of Context

The fourth major flaw Rees and Wynns discuss is “’disregarding context when analyzing gaps in achievement.” Often, a school is compared to the statewide average, when its students are anything but average. They might be affluent, or poor, or recent immigrants. If so, do we learn anything about the quality of their school by comparing them to a state average? 

Rees and Wynns urge school and district leaders to compare their students to schools or districts with demographically similar children. “If you can identify other schools with kids very much like your own who are enjoying success where your students are lagging, you can call the site or district leaders and see how their approach to teaching reading differs from your own,” they suggest. “That last step, compare-and-contrast with colleagues who are teaching students very similar to your own, is where your analytic investment will pay off.”

The authors point a finger of blame at schools of education, which rarely teach future teachers or administrators about data, assessment, or statistics. “Schools of education simply must stop sending data- and assessment-illiterate educators into the field,” they declare.

They also urge state departments of education to disclose the imprecision of test scores whenever they report results, to do more to communicate the meaning of those results, and to create help desks that district and school leaders can turn to with data and assessment questions.

Perhaps their most novel recommendation is that we begin measuring “opportunities to learn,” to draw attention to yawning gaps. Some districts assign students to the school closest to their home, for instance, while others offer significant choices — hence greater opportunity. Most districts give teachers with seniority more ability to choose their schools, leaving the schools in low-income neighborhoods to settle for rookie teachers or those no one else wants — creating a huge opportunity gap for low-income students. Some schools offer the opportunity to take more advanced courses or more career-oriented courses.

A few districts work hard to match their supply of courses and schools to what students and their families want, but most don’t. The result: yet another opportunity gap. “If 90 percent of your sections are dedicated to college-level course work, and 50 percent of your graduating seniors have chosen a path to the workforce or the military, then your master schedule constrains the opportunities to learn that your students care most about,” the book explains. “Work force prep courses and multiple pathways toward work-related professions would be a needed addition for that school. The question for those leading or governing districts is how actively you listen to students when they tell you what future they’re aiming for, and the extent to which you direct your budget and staff to meet their desires.”

A brief article cannot begin to suggest the depth and detail the authors plumb in this volume. In addition, every chapter of Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs includes questions people can ask to uncover data and measurement problems — and methods to solve them — in their own districts and schools. There is even , which includes interactive data visualizations and resources such as a glossary of statistical terms and a “visual glossary” showing the types of charts and graphs you can use to communicate meaningful data.There’s an old saying in the management world: What gets measured gets done. As Rees and Wynns demonstrate, in public education we too often measure the wrong things, in the wrong ways. If we’re going to improve the lives of children, we have to learn how to measure what matters, accurately, and then understand what it means. Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs is a good place to start.

Updated Oct. 31

The recent release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provided a jarring reminder of the pandemic’s impact on academic achievement. The U.S. Department of Education’s portrait of student proficiency in math and English language arts in fourth and eighth grades found declines in every state between 2019 and 2022. In two thirds of states, proficiency rates dropped in both subjects and in both tested grades.

And students in states that re-opened schools quickly during the pandemic often performed no better than those in states that stuck with remote learning longer. Hardest hit were eighth-grade math proficiency rates, which fell 8 percentage points as the raw test score saw its biggest drop in the history of the national testing program.

Though it’s difficult to make precise comparisons between NAEP and state-level standardized test results, the NAEP trends largely mirror the findings of a FutureEd analysis of the testing trends of the 42 states that have released results from spring 2022 and have scores that can be compared to previous years.

English Language Arts

Nationally, 33 percent of fourth graders scored at the proficient or advanced levels on the 2022 NAEP reading assessment, down 2 percentage points from 2019. The share of proficient students also fell two points at the eighth-grade level, from 33 to 31 percent. That comes at reading scores at both grade levels dropped 3 points, leaving them not significantly different from 1992. The 2022 assessment, administered between January and March, included nearly 450,000 fourth and eighth graders in more than 10,000 schools. It relies on a representative sample of students in all states and some large cities, while state testing is intended to capture results from all students.

On the NAEP, a proficient student demonstrates “solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” States typically determine their own standards for what is considered proficiency on their own testing and set a score to determine which students meet the mark. All but six of the 42 states that have released testing results from spring 2022 saw declines in overall proficiency rates from 2019, FutureEd’s analysis shows. A state’s overall proficiency rate includes English language arts scores from grades 3 through 8, as well as a high school test in some states. Seventeen states were within 5 percentage points of their 2019 overall rates. Another 14 dropped five or more points. And in five states, 2022 rates were a striking 10 or more points below their pre-pandemic levels.

On average, states’ English language arts proficiency rates declined 4 percentage points, with North Carolina seeing the largest drop, at 16 points. States did not administer standardized tests in spring 2020, and not all of them tested their students in spring 2021. Of those that did, most made up some ground in English language arts between 2021 and 2022, with an average gain of 1 percentage point. Texas students posted a 9 percentage point proficiency gain, the largest increase among states that have released their 2022 results.

In fourth and eighth grades — which are tested by the NAEP — state standardized test results showed that only four of the 42 states in the FutureEd analysis recorded higher English language arts proficiency scores at the fourth grade level in 2022 than in 2019: Texas, where the proficiency rate was up 11 percentage points, Alabama, up 6 points, and Tennessee, up 5 points. The steepest proficiency declines were in Massachusetts (14 points) and Delaware (13 points).

Eighth-grade English language arts scores had a few bright spots, with Alabama showing a 10 percentage point gain in proficiency, Iowa rising 6 points, Texas rising 3 points and five other states increasing proficiency by a point or two between 2019 and 2022. But the overwhelming majority of states lost ground, with North Carolina registering the largest decline, 15 points.

None of these states saw gains in proficiency on the fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP reading tests, and Tennessee’s rate actually fell by 5 percentage points in fourth grade. Delaware’s sharp decline continued in the NAEP with an 8-point drop in fourth-grade reading, as did North Carolina’s, with a 7-point drop in eighth grade.

The differences between the NAEP and state testing are not entirely surprising. NAEP sets a higher bar for proficiency than most state tests do. Some states actually lowered their cut scores for what qualifies as proficient in the past two years, and some states changed tests. Alabama, Arizona and Kentucky changed tests between 2019 and 2022 and offered cautions while providing comparisons across the years. Maine and New Mexico also changed tests, but the scores could not be compared. At the same time, state tests are often more closely aligned to state standards and what students learn in the classroom — meaning they may capture student achievement trends more accurately.

Math

The results in math were more discouraging, both on the NAEP and state tests. At the NAEP’s fourth-grade level, the rate of students scoring proficient or above fell from 41 percent in 2019 to 37 percent this year. Among eighth graders, the proficiency rate fell from 34% to about 26%. Both are significant drops that mirror unprecedented declines in raw test scores: a 5-point drop at the fourth-grade level and an 8-point decline in eighth grade.

Likewise, all state tests but one in the FutureEd study showed declines in overall math proficiency rates between 2019 and 2022. Eleven states were within five percentage points of their pre-pandemic performance, 22 dropped five or more points and in nine states proficiency rates were 10 or more points below their pre-pandemic levels.

The average drop in statewide proficiency in math was 8 percentage points. Alabama registered the greatest loss, with proficiency dropping 19 percentage points behind the 2019 level. Several other states, including South Dakota, Wyoming and Missouri, were only 3 percentage points behind their pre-pandemic levels by 2022. Mississippi managed to regain all the ground it had lost, the only state to do so in math across all tested grades.

Most states reversed some of their losses in math between 2021 and 2022, with an average increase of 3 percentage points. Virginia had one of the largest increases, at 12 percentage points, though it still lagged its 2019 proficiency level by 16 percentage points.

We found no states making gains in fourth-grade math and several states with steep declines on state tests: proficiency rates dropped 17 percentage points in Virginia, 16 points in Delaware and the District of Columbia, and 13 points in Alabama.

The only proficiency gains on state standardized tests at the eighth-grade level were in Georgia and Missouri, at 1 and 3 percentage points, respectively. Rates were flat in Mississippi. But they were down 24 percentage points in Alabama, the largest drop in the nation, 20 points in Virginia, 17 points in Texas, and 14 points in Ohio, Delaware and Washington state.

FutureEd research associates Benito Aranda-Comer and Nathalie Kirsch contributed to this analysis.

was among the first states to adopt such a measure in 2015. , signed into law by the governor in 2018, took effect two years later amid a flurry of conservative-led education initiatives, many aimed at curtailing classroom discussions about the history of racism in America.

While some states allow schools to develop their own assessments around civics, others use the . Several states do not require schools to report their results, and the mandate often carries with it no additional funding. That’s led critics to wonder if the push is largely symbolic — and some civics experts to find the movement wanting.

Donna Phillips, vice president and chief program officer for the California-based , questioned the use of the citizenship test as a means to impart civics lessons. 

“The naturalization test, for someone who is not in education, social studies or civics, is an easy grab,” she said, but it’s incomplete. 

While it might be better than nothing for those states that do not offer civics in other courses, it’s minimal on its own, requiring only rote memorization rather than critical thinking, she said. 

Data shows nearly 109,000 Pennsylvania students were assessed in the subject in 2020-21, the last school year for which data was available, and nearly 92,000 passed.

The state, a in the upcoming midterm elections, has 500 school districts ranging in size from 200 students to more than 140,000. Some reported the results for the entire district in one pass/fail number while others sent individual outcomes for each school. 

In some cases — as seen in Allegheny Valley, Interboro and South Fayette Township school districts — nearly all children passed. In others — including Annville Cleona, Southwest Leadership Academy, and some 9th graders within the School District of Lancaster — half failed. 

Nearly 18,000 students earned a perfect score.

Taking civics to heart in central Pennsylvania 

Todd Cammarata, a social studies teacher at Tyrone Area High School in central Pennsylvania, said all citizens — not just those who go through the naturalization process — should have a basic understanding of government, history, culture and geography. 

“It’s easier to get buy-in from students on the importance of civic education when I ask them, ‘Do you think every natural-born U.S. citizen should know what we expect naturalized citizens to know?’” he said. “Their answer is almost always ‘Yes.”

No test is perfect, Cammarata said, which leads to other important lessons. 

“The only woman specifically mentioned on the (U.S. citizenship) test is Susan B. Anthony and the only civil rights leader or person of color specifically mentioned is Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said. “So we discuss what they think might be missing from the test or things that are there that are not necessary. This usually leads to a lively discussion of what’s important for citizens to know.”

Less than 10% of Cammarata’s students pass the test on their first try — that initial attempt is a practice test meant to assess their civics knowledge — but nearly all sail through the exam months later, he said.

Some score exceptionally high: Roughly 15 of 45 students last year answered all 100 questions correctly, exempting them from Cammarata’s final exam as per the teacher’s promise. 

Austin Lucas, 15 and a 10th grader, was among the few who passed the test on the first try. 

“It was stuff I learned in school years before,” he said. “I have a pretty good memory.”

Logan Rumberger, 16,  also in the 10th grade, didn’t know enough about the House of Representatives to earn a passing mark on the first go-round but is confident he’ll score higher on the actual test. Like many of Cammarata’s students, he believes all those who live in the United States should have this basic knowledge. 

“Other people have to take it to become U.S. citizens,” he said of the naturalization test. “If we are born here, I feel we should know about our country.” 

Phillips, of the Center for Civic Education, said educators are wise to go deeper than the exam itself. 

“State-level social studies specialists and their district-level counterparts can really do a lot to move beyond the nature of the test,” she said, particularly when results are reported to the state and passage is mandatory for graduation. 

In that case, she said, the topic gains importance and those who work in social studies acquire influence. 

“A lot of times, when assessments are offered only in ELA, math and, in some cases, science, social studies is left behind,” she said. “Getting a seat at the table at the state level is an advantage.” 

Required, but not reported

Arizona, which mandated a civics requirement in 2015, and now requires schools to report the results to the state — and make them .

adopted the civics requirement in 2015 and it went into effect the following year. State officials don’t keep track of test results because it is not a state-administered exam. But a spokesman for the state department of education said Utah’s graduation rate last year was 88.1%, so “it is safe to assume that it (the statewide passage rate) is at least that high.”

law also passed in 2015, but didn’t take effect until the . Since that time, students must correctly answer 65 of 100 civics questions to graduate and may retake the test until they reach that goal. Results are not reported to the state: They are kept at the district level. 

civics requirement began with students in grade 9 in the 2017-18 school year. Since that time, they’ve been required to correctly answer 30 of 50 questions pulled from the country’s naturalization exam to pass the test. Passage, though, is not a graduation requirement and results are not reported to the state. has a similar policy. 

Kentucky’s policy, which requires students to pass a 100-question civics test, took effect July 1, 2018. The exam was

Some state’s requirements have not yet gone into effect. 

July 1, 2023, when students will be required to pass a locally developed civics exam covering the structure, function, and history of the United States government; the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and noteworthy government and civic leaders. Aspiring graduates must also correctly answer 70 percent  of 128 naturalization test questions.

Educators look for their knowledge to extend well beyond high school. 

“I am hopeful that my students retain some of what the citizenship test teaches them, but I am even more hopeful that students take their rights and responsibilities as citizens seriously as they become adults,” Cammarata said.