Teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores usually signal to parents how well a student is grasping reading, writing and math skills, but the two measures “often conflict,” the report said. 

While trends across the country show , an online survey of more than 2,000 parents by researchers at the University of Chicago and Oregon State University found parents are less likely to invest in academic support when a child has high grades and low test scores. Similarly, parents are more likely to intervene when grades are low, even if a student is scoring proficient in standardized tests.

Many parents surveyed voiced resistance to standardized test results as a measure of how their child is doing in school because of cultural bias and appropriateness. Given the options to answer agree, disagree or neither agree nor disagree, nearly 40% said they believe tests “are biased against certain groups,” and 27% “see tests as reflecting a family’s income.”

Grade inflation may make families think a student is performing better than they are; along with a distrust of standardized testing may mean “there’s skills that we’re leaving on the table,” said co-author Derek Rury, assistant economics professor at Oregon State University. 

“If it’s true that parents place more weight on information contained in grades rather than test scores, that has very big implications for the economy and the growth of skills [in students],” Rury said.

The responses around testing confirmed previous research studies around parental skepticism of  standardized testing, including how test questions often lean into and in later grades, wealthier students often performing better on the SAT and ACT because of access to better opportunities. 

In the survey, parents responded more positively to grades, with 71% saying grades are more important than tests in their decision making for their children.

found parents believe that grades “incorporate effort, behavior and compliance in addition to mastery,” the report said. But Rury’s study found parents also likely trust grading because it’s reported regularly throughout the school year and is more understandable.

Grades make performance comparisons relative to classmates, the report said, while test scores are reported annually – usually a year after they’re taken – and make national comparisons, which can be hard to understand.

Standardized test scores are presented with “histograms and numbers, and there’s multiple comparison groups, like my kid in the school district versus my kid nationally, and we’re talking about percentiles and ranks,” said Ariel Kalil, co-author of the study and public policy professor at the University of Chicago. “This is all very confusing to parents.”

Parents are more likely to accept a “familiar, frequently received signal” like grading instead of a “less familiar signal,” like test scores, the report said, “regardless of relative accuracy.”

An emphasis on good grades, “may systematically mislead parents about true standing,” the report said. Grades can mask academic struggles and how well a student fully grasps skills – leading to an underinvestment in resources, according to the report.

Rury also called grades subjective and that “you don’t know what you’re getting.”

“Test scores, for all their flaws, are objective and the same for people who are in that testing regime, which gives us so many advantages,” Rury said.

Other studies have found similar results, including one in 2024 that found don’t match student test scores and newly-released earlier this month that reported grade inflation can reduce a student’s future test scores, graduation rate, college enrollment and lifetime earnings. 

Grade inflation is also being addressed at the higher education level, where instructors at Harvard University would only be able to under a new proposal. 

“The real downstream effect of [grade inflation] is that you have people who are leaving school unprepared for the labor force. … That is a policy failure in the United States,” Rury said. “A big part of what school should do is prepare people with the skills they need to at least figure out how they’re going to be productive later on.”

Part of better equipping students for the future involves reframing the importance of standardized testing, Kalil added.

“In a world in which we know that grades are inflated, and in a world in which we know that on average, test scores are highly valuable predictors of future outcomes, then we’re trying to get to the parents who are just missing the signal,” Kalil said. 

If test scores were made more accessible to parents, the measure could be another trigger to encourage academic intervention. Further investment from parents could help level a playing field for all students when it comes to measuring the full extent of their proficiency, Rury said. 

“For any kind of policymaker, it’s in their best interest to help parents kind of shift the weight from grades to test scores,” Rury said. “We want everyone to succeed, particularly low income kids, who I think are the population that’s really hurt by these test optional policies. Those high-grade, low test scores, kids could really benefit from interventions from their parents.”

Compared to winter results, the end-of-year data on the widely used Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, shows that fewer students were at risk of not learning to read — a decline to 38 percent from 47 percent in kindergarten and a drop to 32 percent from 43 percent at first grade. But the scores at third grade, a critical year for developing more advanced reading skills, haven’t bounced back in the same way.

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The results provide some hope that a full in-person return to school this fall could see young children quickly regain the early literacy skills they missed while learning from home. But students entering fourth grade might need more targeted support to get back on track not only in English language arts but across other content areas as well. In keeping with anecdotal evidence and other assessment results, the Amplify data confirms that the severe disruption in learning caused by the pandemic has disproportionately impacted Black and Hispanic students, but the setback for white students has been minor.

“It is really encouraging to see that when we get back to instruction, the kids in the early grades are really responsive,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. But the pandemic, she added, has magnified existing gaps in reading for Black and Hispanic students. And many in the upper elementary grades will need extra intervention from tutors, reading specialists and others specifically trained in literacy.

The racial disparities were also noted this week in of pandemic-related learning loss from McKinsey and Company, which found that while students ended the year about five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, students in majority Black schools had six months of “unfinished learning” in math and those in high-poverty schools were seven months off track.

In the Amplify report, the DIBELS data represents about 400,000 students from 1,400 schools in 41 states from both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. The sample also mostly reflects students in large, urban metro areas, which serve a higher proportion of Hispanic students than the nation as a whole.

Just prior to schools shutting down in early 2020, 32 percent of Black, 30 percent of Hispanic and 20 percent of white first-graders were severely off track. When the 2020-21 school year ended, 44 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic first graders were significantly behind, but the proportion of white students in that range had increased by only 1 percentage point. At third grade, white students were even less likely to be well off track in reading at the end of the 2020-21 school year than they were before the pandemic.

Kymyona Burk, the policy director for early education at ExcelinEd, a think tank focusing on state education initiatives, said the results match the trends in students returning to school in person. Black and Hispanic students were more likely to finish out the year in remote learning, while white students returned at higher rates.

When students are learning to read in the classroom, teachers are better able to “check for understanding,” Burk said. But at home, a lot of students lacked a reliable internet connection, chronic absenteeism was high and even when students were attending remote classes, many turned off their cameras or didn’t want to speak on screen.

She added that for students who were already struggling readers, remote learning “was an easy way to check out of the process,” while more motivated readers probably weren’t deterred by the virtual format.

As districts decide how to plan recovery efforts this fall, Amplify suggested that it’s essential to collect data on students’ literacy skills and then to organize daily schedules and educators’ time to allow for extra reading instruction.

At last week’s Reagan Institute Summit on Education, Amplify CEO Larry Berger urged educators to take an informal inventory of students’ reading skills when school starts and focus on reestablishing relationships.

High-stakes assessments at the beginning of the year “could do more harm than good,” he said, but added it’s important to gather “enough data to understand where resources need to be deployed.”

This year, lawmakers in several states, including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina and Tennessee, have joined Alabama and Mississippi in passing legislation focusing on comprehensive literacy instruction, Burk said, adding that some are providing guidance on which materials to adopt and ensuring teachers are receiving training using those resources.

These laws, she said, improve equity for Black, Hispanic and low-income students since schools predominantly serving white and upper-income students were already offering high-quality reading instruction.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s review of district plans for using federal relief funds shows that several have prioritized literacy efforts. These include $25 million to hire and train 850 literacy tutors in grades K-5 in Chicago, a reading intervention coordinator in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, and elementary and secondary literacy specialists in Columbus, Ohio schools.

Both Lambert and Burk added that upper elementary teachers will need some support in how to teach foundational reading skills.