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.”

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.

Texas lawmakers have sent legislation replacing STAAR, the state’s widely unpopular state standardized test, to Gov. ’s desk.

Once Abbott signs , Texas will swap the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness for three shorter tests at the beginning, middle and end of each school year. Students will begin to take the new tests in the 2027-28 school year.

“House Bill 8 ends the high stakes and high stress nature of one test, one day,” Rep. , the bill’s author, said Wednesday evening before the Texas House voted to send the proposal to Abbott. “This is unprecedented oversight of the assessment and accountability system by this body.”

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Legislators replaced STAAR amid frustration from families and teachers, who say the test puts too much pressure on students and that preparing for it takes up too much time in the classroom.

The bill’s passage comes after two earlier attempts failed to scrap STAAR. Legislation to that effect during the final hours of this year’s regular lawmaking session because the House and the Senate could not agree on what they wanted out of the new test. Chamber leaders reconciled many of their differences earlier this summer, but when they fled the state in an attempt to stop a rare mid-decade redistricting effort. in August, allowing the House to continue working on legislation.

School accountability experts celebrated the new standardized testing system, which is used to assess whether students have the core academic skills they need to be ready for life after high school. Testing throughout the year, experts said, will give families a better window into how their children are doing and help teachers tailor their instruction to meet students’ needs.

But some House members were displeased with the concessions the lower chamber made to the Senate to reach an agreement. They questioned whether HB 8 does enough to reduce the pressure on students and the amount of time spent on testing.

“This bill was supposed to be the bill that was the win for our public schools and for our kids,” Rep. , D-Austin, said on the House floor Wednesday. “This is no win. This is a terrible bill … I can’t even believe it’s made it this far.”

Here’s what you need to know about the changes coming to the state’s standardized test.

Students to take three, shorter standardized tests

The three shorter tests will replace the end-of-the-year STAAR in an effort to reduce the pressure that a single test puts on students and monitor more closely their academic growth.

Schools that already require students to take nationally recognized assessments will be able to count those as the beginning- and middle-of-the-year tests. It is unclear yet which exams will be acceptable to meet that requirement.

The Texas Education Agency will have a hand in creating the end-of-the-year test. Many House Democrats opposed HB 8 saying the TEA should have less of a role in shaping the test at a time when STAAR’s shortcomings have pushed school districts and families to distrust the agency. Buckley has defended TEA’s role by pointing to a committee of 40 classroom teachers that will act as a counterbalance, reviewing the tests’ questions and weighing in on their rigor.

Families can expect to get test scores in about two days, a much speedier turnaround compared to the current wait, which can take up to several weeks. Results for all three tests will now be presented as percentile ranks, which show how students are performing compared to their classmates. The end-of-year test results would also show the state’s assessment of whether students have approached, met or mastered grade-level skills, like the current STAAR test does.

Proponents of testing students throughout the year hope it will give teachers useful information about where students are struggling, so they can tweak instruction to meet those learning gaps.

Educators can no longer run students through practice tests

Teachers won’t be able to give their students practice exams ahead of the state standardized tests.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath has told lawmakers that practice exams can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the test.

The ban on practice tests could buy back 15 to 30 hours of lost instructional time per student each school year, according to estimates from David Osman, an auditor of standardized testing.

Graduation requirement to pass English II ends

High schoolers will no longer need to pass the English II assessment, which is currently a graduation requirement. It’s the first time Texas has eased graduation testing requirements since 2015, Buckley said.

Students will still need to pass an end-of-the-year test on English I to get their high school diploma, along with exams in algebra and biology.

The House pushed to make exams optional for some subjects in HB 8 to decrease testing. Before the lower chamber voted on the bill, Hinojosa added a provision to get rid of the English II test.

Hinojosa also tried to get rid of social studies portions of the exam. But when HB 8 got to the Senate floor last week, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, added them back in, saying students should test in that subject to ensure they have foundational knowledge for civic engagement. As a result, eighth graders will continue to test on social studies and high schoolers on U.S. history.

Scores on three tests will count toward schools’ A-F ratings

Texas uses standardized test results to grade schools on how well they are educating their students through what is known as the state’s A-F accountability system. With testing set to change, legislators instructed TEA to develop a metric for student progress based on growth over the three new tests, with the intent of factoring that metric into each school’s rating.

Such a metric hasn’t been introduced into any state’s school accountability system, according to analysis from EdTrust. It is unclear how the TEA will create a consistent way to track student growth given that schools will be allowed to take different tests for the beginning and middle of the year.

HB 8 also waded into how much power TEA should have in changing the benchmarks for schools to get a good grade, a key point of tension in between school districts and the education agency. The bill codifies that the TEA has the power to refresh those goal posts every five years. It also requires TEA to announce any changes to the accountability system by July 15 of each year, about a month before the school year starts.

The stakes for how the state measures schools’ performance are : Failing grades can bring on state sanctions, like forcing a struggling school to close or ousting a district’s democratically elected school board.

In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, the legislation also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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. 

At first glance, calls from members of Congress to in might sound like a neutral policy.

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

This would require a feasible restructuring of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to focus on the annual creation and implementation of the NAEP, in contrast to its previous biennial schedule. Additionally, states already have the infrastructure for standardized testing, as all 50 states administer various assessments. 

Some adjustments might be necessary for the reformed IES, which would need to collaborate with state offices responsible for test administration to successfully implement the NAEP on an annual basis for all eligible students, not just the current sample populations. However, there are still many advantages to this approach.

First, NAEP provides a consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance. Many states report higher proficiency rates on their own assessments than on NAEP, creating a false sense of achievement. If all fourth and eighth grade students in states that receive federal Title I funding were required to take the NAEP annually, the discrepancy between state and national standards would become harder to ignore. States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations.

States such as Mississippi have already shown what’s possible when NAEP results are taken seriously. Mississippi’s so-called “miracle” — its leap into the top half of state rankings in 2020 and 2022—demonstrates the value of using NAEP-aligned standards as a driver for systemic change. By contrast, allowing states to accept federal funding without comparable transparency has led to low expectations and weak accountability frameworks.

Second, expanding NAEP would provide parents with a more accurate picture of how their children are performing relative to peers nationwide. Calls for greater in education — amplified during and after the pandemic — have made clear that many families want more than vague reassurances from schools. A truly national assessment would offer objective, comparable data without increasing testing burdens year after year. In its current form, NAEP tests only samples of students, providing no real insight into how individual students or schools are doing.

Third, this proposal could significantly reduce unnecessary s. To receive Title I funding under the , states must administer annual assessments from grades 3 through 8, a requirement that consumes substantial��classroom time, financial and instructional resources.��

If Congress eliminated this requirement and recommended that states administer only the NAEP in fourth and eighth grades, that could facilitate more targeted transparent evaluations and reduce assessment costs for states. Additionally, standardized tests administered from grades 3 to 8 may not be necessary for improving student outcomes. A study of test scores in showed that, on average, a student’s test scores in their first year correlated at a rate greater than 0.90 with their next year performance.

Finally, making NAEP universal would offer a balanced form of federal oversight: less intrusive than programmatic mandates, but more informative than current reporting requirements. If decentralization is the path forward for U.S. education, it must be accompanied by a shared yardstick to assess progress. A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results. The Obama-era effort to tie teacher evaluations to student performance had little impact at the national level, though districts like Dallas and Washington, D.C., saw promising gains. These cases suggest that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts. 

Designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria. It would offer the federal government a low-cost, high-impact mechanism for improving transparency and setting consistent expectations without dictating how states should teach or allocate resources —it would be left up to them.

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

The measure, which does not eliminate the administration of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, but rather its role as a graduation requirement, passed with of voters in support and 41% opposed, with 96% of votes reported as of Wednesday afternoon. The “yes” vote was particularly strong in western Massachusetts, while towns and cities in the greater Boston area were more likely to vote against it, according to reporting from . In Weston, one of the state’s wealthiest communities, 2 in 3 voters cast ballots in opposition, according to the Globe. 

Students still must meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined measures, set by the some 300 school districts. 

When asked about next steps at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Maura Healey, who was a of the measure, said “The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will be out with guidance shortly on that … But the voters spoke on that question. And I don’t know what will come as of just yet.”

In response to a question about her willingness to entertain bills that would overturn the measure, Healey said, “I’ll review anything that comes to my desk, but I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals.” 

Those who wanted to keep the requirement and see the ballot measure defeated — including Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler and the National Parents Union — argued that the MCAS is a high-quality assessment that is necessary to hold schools accountable, communicate progress with students and their parents, and establish consistent academic expectations statewide.

Those in favor of the ballot measure — backed by the statewide — argued that the testing requirement narrowed curriculum, forcing teachers to “teach to the test.” Each year, more than 700 students — including many English language learners and students with disabilities — are unable to graduate because they didn’t pass the MCAS or because they didn’t meet local district requirements.

Historically, approximately 70,000 10th graders sat for at least one of the three MCAS exams each year. Based on state policies, students had to earn a passing score on all three exams to earn a diploma. Those who didn’t could try again at least four times and some students were able to participate in an appeal process or an alternative pathway. Ultimately, the vast majority of students — about 99% — met the requirements.

“With this election victory, voters have welcomed a new era in our public schools,” said Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy in a following the announcement that voters approved Question 2. “This is the beginning of more holistic and thorough assessments of student work.” 

Leading the charge on the ballot measure, the union poured $7.7 million into its campaign as of Oct. 1 and opponents spent $1.2 million, according to reporting from the .

John Schneider, the chair of , a coalition opposed to the ballot measure, said in a statement that, “Eliminating the graduation requirement without a replacement is reckless. The passage of Question 2 opens the door to greater inequity; our coalition intends to ensure that door does not stay open.”

This point was echoed by the president of the , Keri Rodrigues, in an interview with ����Ӱ�� Wednesday afternoon.

“I think it’s a strong signal about what we’ve been warning about: that we’re going to watch the inequities in Massachusetts kind of just go wider and wider and wider” as more affluent districts largely maintain high standards and others lower theirs.

Rodrigues said she and other advocates will immediately begin calling for legislation that implements new statewide graduation requirements based on , a state-recommended program of study, which includes the successful completion of four credits of English, math and a lab-based science, along with a number of other requirements.

James Peyser, former state education secretary, is similarly concerned about the new lack of regulation. “We had [a graduation standard],” he told ����Ӱ��. “I think it was working well, and I’m disappointed that the ballot question passed because it replaces something — something that’s working — with nothing. But we need to fill that void as quickly as possible.”

(Correction appended November 7, 2024)

Massachusetts mom Shelley Scruggs says she’s spent the last decade thinking and worrying about standardized testing — specifically the three exams her son would need to pass in order to earn a high school diploma.

A junior at a technical high school in Lexington, her son, who has ADD and an Individualized Education Program, has always found greater success with interactive, hands-on learning and is now studying plumbing.

Last spring, he took the English, science and math exams. While she believes it’s important to assess how kids are doing in school, a frustrated Scruggs sees the exam requirement as forcing teachers to teach to a test, narrowing curriculum, putting undue stress on students and making the most vulnerable feel bad about themselves.

Her son is one of the approximately 70,000 10th graders who sit for at least one of the three Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams each year. Based on state policies, students must earn a passing score on all three exams to earn a diploma. Those who don’t can try again at least four times and some students are able to participate in an appeal process or an alternative pathway. Ultimately, the vast majority of students — about 99% — meet the requirements.

Scruggs said her son’s experiences motivated her to try and repeal the state’s graduation requirement. She drafted a ballot initiative last year and began collecting signatures, ultimately joining efforts with the Massachusetts Teachers Association. After collecting 170,000 signatures, the union got the question officially certified on the Nov 6 ballot, where it will appear as Question 2.

Lexington parent Shelley Scruggs, who initiated the ballot question to end the MCAS grad requirement, told legislators: This test “penalizes students like my son who are just not good test-takers.”

— Massachusetts Teachers Association (@massteacher)

The measure does not propose eliminating the administration of the MCAS exam, but rather its role as a statewide graduation requirement. If it passes, students in Massachusetts would still need to meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined requirements set by the roughly 300 school districts.

Scruggs recently got a call from her son’s guidance counselor: He passed his math and science MCAS exams, but failed the English exam by one point. Describing it “as the best phone call I ever got in my life,” she remains staunchly opposed to the graduation requirement and is campaigning alongside the union in favor of Question 2.��

The statewide teachers association has spent more than on the effort.  MTA President Max Page told  , “We’ve long  believed that this fixation on this one test does not help us understand how a student or school is doing.” 

Page, and other union representatives, did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s multiple requests for comment. 

Those who want to keep the requirement and see the ballot measure defeated — including Gov. Maura Healey, Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler and The National Parents Union  — argue that the MCAS is a high-quality assessment that is necessary to hold schools accountable, communicate progress with students and their parents and establish consistent academic expectations statewide.

According to the conducted between Oct. 2-6 by Suffolk University and the Globe, 58% of the 500 Massachusetts residents surveyed plan to vote “yes,” on Question 2, eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement, and 37% plan to vote “no.”

The state education department recently released the which predictably dropped in the pandemic’s wake and following the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision — implemented for the first time this spring —  to for what’s considered a passing score.

Statewide, 10th graders exceeded or met expectations on the English exam, 48% on the math exam, and 49% on the science one.  Historically, only of students — around 700 total — ultimately miss the requirement, the majority of whom are English language learners or have a disability.

Massachusetts resident Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union and the parent of five kids, one of whom receives special education services, believes that getting rid of the requirement in the name of kids with disabilities is “really offensive.”

“[My son] absolutely took and passed the MCAS … Kids like Matthew are capable not only of proficiency,” she said, “but excellence.”

Rodrigues argued that the data collected from MCAS scores actually contribute to equity, rather than detracting from it.

“The idea that we would just toss away data and call it social justice,” she said, “is just — it’s wild to me… we need more data and information on our kids so that we can be better equipped to help them and figure out what the challenges are.”

Massachusetts as a bellwether

The MCAS graduation requirement goes back to the 1993 Education Reform Act; it’s been used since 2003 as part of the graduation standard. Before that, the only state requirements were a U.S. history course credit and gym classes.

And what happens in Massachusetts, ranked the top state for public education nationally, matters greatly, said James Peyser, former state education secretary.

“I think Massachusetts in many ways is a bellwether for what goes on around the country… If a question like this succeeds here, I think it’ll send a signal to policymakers and to union leaders and educators … around the country that maybe it’s time to abandon the whole exercise,” he said.

As election day nears and the debate intensifies, neither side wants to focus on the high passing rate, according to Evan Horowitz, the executive director of at Tufts University who authored on the ballot measure. He found that those who don’t pass the MCAS typically don’t meet district requirements for graduation either.

Those in favor of the exam insist it’s a rigorous standard and those opposed insist it’s an unfair hurdle, “so there’s sort of no constituency to the argument that actually this test might be too easy to really matter, certainly too easy to have a big, statewide fight over,” he said. 

John Papay, director of the at Brown University and lead author of on the MCAS exam, said both test scores and course grades predict longer-term student outcomes and test scores can tell us something beyond grades about how well high schoolers are prepared for college and career. 

He remains concerned about how well vulnerable student groups are being served overall. 

“The question about the exit exam is a little bit of a red herring around this bigger, critically important question about, ‘How are we ensuring that English learners [and] students with disabilities, are getting the skills that they need out of the Massachusetts public education system?’”

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the reach of the ballot proposition. The measure proposes the elimination of the MCAS��exam as a statewide graduation requirement. If it passes, students in Massachusetts would still need to meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined measures, set by the roughly 300 school districts.��

Ten Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) community schools will be given an opportunity to pilot new approaches to assessments in the 2025-26 academic year. 

And once the schools adopt alternative assessments, they won’t have to participate in standardized tests, other than those mandated by state and federal governments, the district school board decided in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. 

The policy, which comes as part of the , was authored by LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg and board members Rocio Rivas and Kelly Gonez. 

Goldberg said that over the past several decades, corporate entities have turned education’s focus away from cultivating a love for learning — and toward test taking, which she believes has become the “be-all and judge-all of schools.” 

She emphasized that multiple choice, standardized assessments are not the only way to gauge students’ learning. 

“I knew where my students were, what they could read, what they understood, what they didn’t — because that’s what you do when you teach,” Goldberg said, adding that class discussions and projects can also be used to observe progress. “You’re continuously assessing.”

Once the 10 community schools establish new “innovative, authentic, rigorous and relevant” methods of assessment, they will not be required to administer the district’s iReady diagnostic tests, which teachers have criticized for taking up large chunks of instructional time. 

Rivas said students would be relieved of some of the anxiety and stress that comes from ongoing standardized testing. She read several messages she had received from students in the district during Tuesday’s meeting.

“If we already take five state tests … in the end of the year, why do we take the end of the year iReady?” one student wrote in a letter to Rivas. “They both are the same reason: to show you what we know.” 

“I was really stressed out — worrying about all of these tests. I also gained a lot of anxiety since testing started, and I could not focus on my own life because I was so stressed.” 

LAUSD board member George McKenna, however, opposed the measure, questioning how students are supposed to learn without being given tests to work toward. He added that the initiative has “promise” but that he did not trust the policy would be implemented properly. 

Board members Tanya Ortiz Franklin and Nick Melvoin also voted against the resolution — which will require LAUSD to establish a Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning Initiative that community schools can apply to be part of. 

Schools that are part of the initiative would have to select a community school “lead tacher” who is grant funded and would receive additional professional development from both Community School Coaches and UCLA Center for Community Schooling, among others. 

The 10 schools in the cohort, according to the resolution, will also have to adapt their instructional programs to “integrate culturally relevant curriculum, community- and project-based learning, and civic engagement.”

“This is just one step,” Gonez said during Tuesday’s meeting. “But I really look forward to the way this resolution will be implemented — to see what innovative ideas that I know our teachers have and see how we may be able to pilot a more joyful education, a transformative education, which really brings the community schools model to full fruition.” 

Missouri students are showing progress on standardized tests administered by the state, with results in some categories approaching — and even exceeding — pre-pandemic levels.

But in other areas — most notably English language arts — students continue to struggle.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education revealed preliminary scores in the Missouri Assessment Program, or MAP, to the State Board of Education Tuesday.

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Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a board member from Pasadena Hills, said she was “a little deflated that we didn’t see more growth and progress.”

DESE is implementing programs to address low levels of literacy, an issue throughout the United States, with interventions based on the science of reading and .

Westbrooks-Hodge said the intervention has worked like triage care; it “stopped the bleed” and scores are static.

“We made lots of great investments in the last two years, and I think we’re going to see the fruit of that as our score starts to increase,” she said. “All of these interventions are working. They’re stabilizing our educational system, and now we can start layering growth on top of that.”

English language arts scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, according to data presented Tuesday, with 56% of students scoring in the “basic” or “below basic” range. This percentage has held steady since 2022.

Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner of quality schools, said it takes “continuous, sustained focused implementation with fidelity at the local level, up to five years, before we start to see results on large-scale measures.”

She noted that teacher shortages could be impacting the scores, as a battle of the 2023-24 school year.

When looking at scores across all subjects and grades, there is an observable improvement since 2021’s tests. That year, 24% of scores were in the “below basic” range. That’s fallen to 22% this year, still higher than the 19% below basic in the  last pre-pandemic tests in 2019. The number of scores in proficient and advanced ranges are one-percent less than 2019’s achievement.

Math scores are exceeding pre-pandemic levels, with a one-percent boost in the advanced category compared to 2019 when looking at grades 3-8. Sireno noted that middle-school math has exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

Sireno expects additional analysis, especially as educators look at local-level data.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

Spring 2024 preliminary state test results reported to districts across the state were scored incorrectly according to the Mississippi Department of Education, leading the agency to end a contract with the company responsible for the error.

School districts across the state were left scrambling to re-assess the corrected data, which they use to make determinations about everything from graduation requirements to instructional strategies for the 2024-25 school year, which for some districts has already begun. Some students ended up meeting graduation requirements and graduating in the summertime.

The majority of initial data was incorrect due to erroneous scoring by the Northwest Evaluation Association — the Oregon-based company the state contracted with to provide and process the tests. In a July 18 meeting, the State Board of Education voted to sever their contract with the company, which the state has been working with since 2015. The Mississippi Academic Assessment Program measures student achievement in English Language Arts, mathematics, science and U.S. history.

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The average yearly contract with the company has been $8,161,518.84.

“We were not aware that there was any type of error when we initially received the files from the vendor, but we were concerned,” Paula Vanderford, chief accountability officer for MDE, said.

At the state level, the dip in proficiency scores raised eyebrows, but MDE staff was unable to identify anything that would confirm the scores were inaccurate.

The results were then shared with school districts. Many districts reported knowing that something was wrong as soon as the scores were returned to them, because of their ability to look at individual student performance.

“The word I kept using was unexpected,” said Ryan Kuykendall, chief accountability officer for DeSoto County Public Schools, the largest public school district in the state. “We do a lot of assessments throughout the year to track student progress and adjust our instruction, so the hope is that when the state assessment comes back you sort of know where the students are. So, the results were unexpected.”

The data was released to school districts on June 17. By July 2, after communication with districts about their concerns, the state confirmed that the data was erroneous and that they would be receiving a new batch of data.

This put a squeeze on central offices across the state, who had to process the test results for a second time, in a fraction of the time.

“It was extra work. There’s no way to deny that. The way I viewed it and tried to get across to our department is that we’re just after the correct results. Whatever the correct results are, are what we need,” Kuykendall said. “But I can’t pretend that it didn’t make our administrative schedule very difficult and tight.”

MDE identified the error, but it had to rely on the vendor to fix the programming error that led to the erroneous scoring and provide the state with correct data.

Though a different vendor processes the 5th and 8th grade science, biology and U.S. History MAAP assessments, all state test results were processed again to ensure accuracy, State Superintendent of Education Lance Evans said.

MDE was unable to provide details about the severance of its contract with NWEA, but to Data Recognition Corp. for the upcoming school year. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, of which NWEA is a division, will continue to be the provider for the state’s .

“In short, faulty item parameters used in our scoring process resulted in incorrect achievement level thresholds, which determine how students perform on an assessment,” Simona Beattie, communications director for NWEA, said in an email. “While we are disappointed in the decision made by the Mississippi State Department of Education to terminate our contract…we understand the state’s frustration and are focusing on our continued work with MDE to provide its alternative state assessments.”

Statewide, the Mississippi Department of Education has been notified of 12 students across seven districts who became eligible to graduate after the assessments were rescored, and graduated this summer. None of the scoring changes resulted in those students passing the tests — Mississippi students who score well enough on subject area tests can graduate if their class scores are high enough.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Released Tuesday, from over 7.7 million students who took the widely used MAP Growth tests from NWEA doesn’t bode well for teens entering high school this fall. Finishing 4^th grade when the pandemic hit, many students not only lost at least a year of in-person learning, but also transitioned to middle school during a chaotic period of teacher vacancies and rising absenteeism.  

The 2023-24 results reflect the last tests administered before federal COVID relief funds run out. Districts must allocate any remaining funds by the end of September — a cutoff that is expected to cause further disruption as districts eliminate staff and programs aimed at learning recovery.

Older students don’t make gains as quickly as younger kids and will have to work harder to catch up, the researchers said. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic “continue to reverberate” for children in the early elementary grades, many of whom missed out on preschool because of COVID. On average, students need at least four extra months of schooling to catch up.

“It’s not fun to continue to bring this bad news to the education community, and I certainly wish it was a brighter story to tell,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA. “It is pretty frustrating for us, and I’m sure very disheartening for folks on the ground that are still working very hard to help kids recover.”

Thus far, only two states, California and Colorado, have asked officials for extra time to spend the diminishing relief funds that remain, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That means the question for most leaders is how to keep paying for extra tutoring and staffing levels for students still learning below grade level — especially those belonging to groups that weren’t meeting expectations before the pandemic.

Relief money “made a difference, but it certainly did not eliminate the learning loss,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the . A he authored showed that recovery linked to those dollars was small, in part because the federal government gave districts few restrictions on how to spend it. 

The American Rescue Plan’s requirement that districts devote 20% of the $122 billion toward reversing learning decline was “super loosey goosey in terms of what that actually meant, how it was measured and what programs counted,” he said.

Some districts that hired teaching assistants to give students additional practice in reading and math have now lost those positions. Dothan Preparatory Academy in Alabama, a seventh- and eighth-grade school, had several staff members who gave students “a few extra lessons” throughout the day based on their MAP scores, said Charles Longshore, an assistant principal. Now those positions are gone. 

He hopes a new sixth grade academy opening next month will better prepare kids for grade-level material. Two years ago, when he joined the Dothan City Schools, just north of the Florida Panhandle, he attended a districtwide administrator meeting where every school’s data was posted on the walls.  

He remembers looking at elementary school scores with “really low” student proficiency rates of roughly 20% to 30%; teachers have been trying to fill those gaps ever since. 

“We’re trying to go backwards to go forwards,” he said. “What third, fourth and fifth grade standards did you miss that are essential for your understanding of seventh and eighth grade standards?”

The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.

In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, NWEA’s Lewis added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe. 

But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit . The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids.

The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.

“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”

School closures were especially hard on students with learning disabilities. Both of Tracy Compton’s daughters, who are entering fifth and seventh grade this fall, have dyslexia and didn’t receive services during the pandemic when they were in the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. 

“The time they were learning to read was during the school board’s shutdown of schools,” she said. Under a , the Fairfax district still pays for makeup services with a private tutor. 

But Compton also moved to a Massachusetts district where she feels her girls are getting the support they need, like access to audio books and noise-canceling headphones during tests to help them focus. “They have made progress, but [have] not fully recovered,” she said.

She said too many parents don’t know their children are behind.

“They see the report card with A’s or whatever and think all is fine,” she said. “They don’t know where else to check and how to weigh things like standardized tests.”

That’s likely because different tests often tell different stories. The MAP results, for example, are worse than what many states have reported about student performance on their own assessments, which are used for accountability. 

Several states last year noted at least partial recovery, and a few showed students had even reached or were exceeding 2019 scores. Lewis explained that state tests measure the “blunt designation between proficient or not,” while MAP tests capture the full spectrum of student achievement levels during the school year.

Districts, particularly low-income districts that received the most funding, need to contend with the latest snapshots of students’ learning as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds, Goldhaber said. 

“How districts go about dealing with the fiscal cliff is going to have pretty significant consequences, particularly for the kids that were most impacted by the pandemic,” he said. If districts have to lay off staff — and newer teachers are the first to go — they should limit the impact on the neediest students. “They’ll be shuffling teachers within districts, and that shuffle itself is harmful for student achievement.”

As more time passes since the pandemic, Lewis added that school leaders might be tempted to stop comparing their students’ performance to pre-COVID levels, when states were in closing achievement gaps. 

“What keeps me up at night is this idea that these persistent achievement gaps are inevitable, that this is just how it’s going to be,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think it takes innovation and creative thinking … to get us out of this mess.”

New state standardized test results show stagnant progress among Hoosier students in grades 3-8, signaling a continued struggle to reverse widespread learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic.

New ILEARN scores show 41% of Indiana students who were tested earlier this spring were at or above proficiency standards in English and language arts (ELA), according to . That’s on par with the year prior, when 40.7% of students were proficient.

The percentage of students at or above proficiency standards in math, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease — from 40.9% in 2023 to 40.7% in the most recent school year.

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Data released by IDOE reported 30.8% of Hoosier students passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. That’s slightly up from

Nearly 493,000 students sat for both exams this spring.

“While many grades have seen increases in both ELA and math proficiency over the past three years, we must continue to keep our foot on the gas pedal to ensure all students have a solid academic foundation in order to maximize their future opportunities,” Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said in a statement. “A number of key tactics have been put in place to support educators, parents, families and students. It is essential that our local schools and parents/families continue to work together and stay laser-focused on improving student learning in ELA, as well as math.”

Test results breakdowns

ILEARN scores continue to trail behind 2019 results, when 47.9% of Hoosiers in grades 3-8 earned passing scores on the English portion of the ILEARN, and 47.8% did so in math. That year, 37.1% of students were proficient in both sections.

But due to instruction changes spurred by COVID-19 and disruption of 2020 assessments, state officials use the 2021 ILEARN results to represent the current Indiana baseline.

When using that baseline, ELA proficiency has increased across most grade levels; third graders decreased 0.1%; fourth graders increased 2.2%; fifth graders increased 0.8%; sixth graders increased 1.2%; seventh graders increased 0.7%; and eighth graders increased 1.3%.

IDOE officials emphasized that many students who were in third grade in 2024 received instruction in either a fully or partially virtual setting during kindergarten due to the pandemic, which likely contributed to decreased student success.

The 2024 statewide ILEARN results show a slight increase in English proficiency across most grade levels compared to 2023.

The highest year-to-year increases were in grade four, up 1.5%, and grade seven, up 2.3%.  Proficiency in those grades is the highest since the pandemic, according to IDOE.

Since the 2021 baseline, math proficiency has additionally increased across all grade levels.

But compared to 2023, the latest ILEARN results in math proficiency decreased across the board — except in grade seven, which had a 1% increase in 2024.

ILEARN was first implemented in 2019 to replace the ISTEP exam for students from third to eighth grade. The exam measures proficiency in various subjects starting in third grade, but the main focus is on English/language arts and mathematics. All schools test in-person and electronically, unless an accommodation requires a paper assessment.

With federal permission, the assessment was not given in 2020 due to pandemic-related school closures.

A look at certain student populations

Since 2023, Black students had the highest percentage point increase in English — 1.2% — and also saw an 8% increase in math proficiency. The 2024 results show 20.9% of Black students scored proficient on the ILEARN in English, and 17% in math. About 11.7% of Black students earned passing scores on both portions of the test in 2024, according to the latest numbers.

Compared to the 2021 baseline, Black students have seen a 3.5% increase in English proficiency and a 5.4% increase in math.

Jenner called the data “notable,” given that “it’s not as common to see” such continued improvements. Rather, she said, education officials expect to see more “ups and downs” year over year.

Even so, Scott Bess, head of the Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis and member of the state education board, cautioned that more rapid improvements are needed.

“While it’s great that our Black students have shown progress, our English language learners have shown progress, the bar was really, really low, right?” Bess said. “If we keep on that trajectory, I’m going to be in a home before we get to any kind of acceptable results,” Bess continued.

Among other student populations, proficiency in both English and math decreased slightly for Hispanic students.

Students in special education and students receiving free or reduced price meals, meanwhile, had slight gains in both English and math from 2023 to 2024.

English learners — who were identified in 2023 as needing continued targeted support in English — have since had a 0.8% increase. IDOE officials said additional targeted support is still needed in math, though, given a 0.3% decrease on that section of the ILEARN. Total English proficiency on the ILEARN among English learners this spring was recorded at 13.8%, and math proficiency at 17.6%.

Changes on the horizon

The new results come amid an ongoing undertaking to and allow an option for schools to divvy up portions of the exam across the academic year.

The assessment plan includes what state education officials call “flexible checkpoints” for schools to administer ILEARN preparation tests in English and math before the typical end-of-year summative tests. A dozen other states already have similar models.

The redesigned assessment will have three “checkpoints” and a shortened summative assessment at the end of the school year. Checkpoints will consist of 20 to 25 questions and hone in on four to six state standards. The exams are designed to be administered to students about every three months, but local schools and districts can speed up testing if they wish.

Checkpoints won’t be punitive; if a student does not master a particular standard, they’ll receive additional intervention and instruction before having a retest option.

So far, 72% of schools across Indiana have opted-in to participate in a pilot of ILEARN checkpoints during the upcoming 2024-25 school year, according to IDOE. The overall system will take effect during the 2025-26 school year.

Jenner and other education officials reiterated on Wednesday that the new checkpoints will provide improved, real-time student data that can be used to better target supports for students throughout the year — rather than waiting until the end of the year for results, “when it may be too late” for teachers to provide support.

Also upcoming are changes to the state’s IREAD tests, which gauges students’  foundational reading skills.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers approved — a year earlier than current requirements. Local educators must direct new, targeted support to at-risk students and those struggling to pass the literacy exam.

But if, after three tries, a third grader can’t meet the IREAD standard, legislators want school districts to hold them back.

Those changes take effect in the upcoming 2024-25 school year.

Data from 2023 showed . Jenner said IREAD exam results from the most recent academic year are expected to be made public next month.

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. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

About 600 schools have joined a pilot program to give Indiana’s Learning Evaluation and Assessment Readiness Network (ILEARN) tests in four stages next school year, instead of just end-of-year tests that are used for state report cards. 

In the pilot, the state will give three new “checkpoint” math and English tests spread through the school year to third- through eighth-graders that let teachers see right away how well students perform, allowing lessons to be adjusted.

“The checkpoints will be very intentionally for the school…the local teacher…to improve the learning in that classroom,” said Indiana state education superintendent Katie Jenner.

The mid-year scores won’t be reported publicly or count toward school or district report cards, which will remain based on the end of year tests.

“It’s not punitive,” Jenner told the state school board. “It’s in support of student learning, which is why we’re all here.”

The checkpoint tests will fill much of the role of the diagnostic tests districts buy from private providers and regularly use during the year, like NWEA’s Measures of Academic Promise (MAP) tests and Edmenutum’s Exact Path tests, state officials said.State Rep. Bob Behning, author of a bill passed this spring giving final authorization of the pilot.

“I frequently hear education leaders complain about the fact that their kids look like they’re doing great, but when they take ILEARN, they don’t,” said Behning. “The reality is this test will be aligned directly to statewide assessments, so there will be that much more correlation and much more predictability.”

If the checkpoint tests go well, he said, the state might stop giving more than $14 million in grants each year to districts to pay for other diagnostic tests, which it has done since 2015. Districts could use just the free ILEARN checkpoints and stop buying other tests.

“We know already that some of the benchmark providers are not happy with this direction,” Behning said.

Kevin Briody, chief marketing officer for Edmentum, one of a handful of vendors approved for grant money, did not object to the new tests and said his company supports improving tests to help teachers.

NWEA representatives, however, would not answer whether their company is worried about losing business.

Mid-year standardized tests are common nationally and go by several names-— diagnostic, formative or through-year tests. Though districts often pay for such tests on their own, Indiana is one of 13 states either using or exploring a plan to give them, according to a report by Education First, an education advocacy organization.

That report, cited by Indiana Department of Education officials in presentations on the plan, was partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

How states use through-year tests varies, though most, like Indiana, use just the final test to rate schools and districts. A few states  — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana and Montana  — are considering or using results from all tests during the year to set a final student school and district rating, that report found. 

According to the plan outlined to Indiana’s state school board last year, the “checkpoint” tests will be given every nine or 10 weeks during the school year with flexibility for districts to pick testing days. 

Each test will have 25 to 30 questions covering four to seven learning standards in the subject.

At each checkpoint test, students and teachers will see if they are on-track or off-track for passing the final test as well as how they compare to other students in the state.

Students who “fail” a checkpoint test can receive help in tested skills and re-take the test later to see if they have learned them.

Giving students a chance to re-learn skills and then be tested on them again is a step toward schools potentially using a “mastery” or “competency” learning and grading system, a concept with growing support among some state officials. Such systems have students keep working on skills until they “master” them, rather than having a class move on to other material after a set period of time and just giving low grades to students that lag behind.

“If a school really wanted to get into a true kind of mastery, competency-based (approach), they could use these assessments to really understand where students are at different points and act accordingly,” said state school board member Scott Bess.

So far, the tests seem to have support statewide. The state’s plan to make the final, year-end ILEARN test shorter because of the added tests eased concerns about testing taking too much time, said Terry Spradlin, executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association.

“It makes kind of good sense, so we’ll be supportive of that for sure,” he said.

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to ����Ӱ��.

“Standards-based reform” in the heyday of the education reform movement was a bit like the title of a recent film: Everything Everywhere All at Once. The strategy of setting statewide standards, measuring student performance against those standards, and then holding schools accountable for the results was at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dominated education policy for most of the “long NCLB period” from the 1990s into the 2010s. To many observers, standards-based reform was education reform, and so the question about whether standards-based reform worked is equivalent to asking whether education reform worked.

Answering that question is only possible if we define what’s in and what’s out: What counts under the umbrella of standards-based reform? Did it succeed as an overall strategy? Were there individual components that were particularly effective?

In this chapter, we will work our way through these and related questions, but readers should beware that the results will not be entirely satisfying. Get ready for a lot of shrugging. We know, for example, that student achievement improved markedly in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the very time that states were starting to put standards, tests, and “consequential accountability” into place. Some of the gains can be directly attributed to those policies. But the improvement was likely driven by other factors, too, some of which had very little to do with education policy or even schools, such as the plummeting child poverty rate at the time.

On the flip side, when student achievement plateaued and even started to decline in the 2010s, it’s plausible that the tapering off was related to the softening of school-level accountability, as NCLB lost steam and eventually gave way to the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Common Core State Standards. But hard evidence is scant, and it’s difficult to know for sure, especially because—again—so much else was going on at the same time. That included the aftermath of the Great Recession (and its budget cuts) as well as the advent of smartphones and social media, which may have depressed student achievement just as they boosted teenage anxiety and depression.

And while we know that standards, testing, and especially accountability drove some of the improvements in student outcomes in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in math, we unfortunately have limited information about exactly what schools did to get those better results. For the most part, the “black box” that is the typical K–12 classroom stayed shut.

Here’s the good news: despite all these uncertainties, there’s still much we can learn from the era of standards-based reform—both for future efforts to use standards, assessments, and accountability to improve outcomes and for education reform writ large.

A short history of standards-based reform

The NCLB Act locked into place a specific version of standards-based reform, one that incorporated a mishmash of ideas that had been floating around since the 1980s and arguably since the 1960s. Think of it like a dish at a fusion restaurant, reflecting a novel combination of flavors and culinary lineages—not always with a satisfying outcome.

One might even say that this version of standards-based reform was incoherent—which is ironic, given that coherence was arguably the number-one goal of the original progenitors of the idea. In a series of articles and books in the late 1980s, scholars Jennifer O’Day and Marshall Smith argued for what they called “systemic reform.” Their key insight was that the multiple layers of governance baked into the US education system as well as myriad conflicting policies emanating from the many cooks in the K–12 kitchen were pulling educators in too many directions. What we needed was to fix the system as a whole, to think comprehensively and coherently and thereby get everyone rowing in the same direction in pursuit of stronger and more equitable student outcomes.

To do so, we needed to get serious about “alignment.” We should start with a clear set of desired outcomes, also known as standards, delineating what we expect students to know and be able to do—at the end of high school but also at key milestones along the way. Those curricular standards would set forth both the content of what kids needed to learn and the level at which they needed to learn it. Regular assessments would help practitioners and policymakers understand whether kids were on track to meet expectations and ready to progress to the next grade level and, ultimately, high school graduation. This approach would allow for the assessment of student performance against common expectations and criteria rather than measuring students against one another (norm-referenced evaluation and rankings) to determine academic achievement. But perhaps most importantly, all the other key pieces of the education apparatus needed to be aligned to the standards as well—especially teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, and funding systems.

O’Day and Smith didn’t say much about “accountability” as we would later come to talk about it—consequences that would accrue to educators, especially for poor student performance. Instead, their focus was primarily on coherence, alignment, and building “capacity” in the system to improve teaching and learning.

Systemic reform was popular with traditional education groups. It spoke to the frustration of classroom teachers as well as principals and superintendents, without directly threatening the political power of key constituencies, especially teachers’ unions. They welcomed the additional help envisioned by scholars such as O’Day and Smith—and the additional money.

But this approach was hardly the only school improvement game in town. Other ideas were gaining prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, too, ideas promulgated by governors, economists, political scientists, and business leaders. To oversimplify a bit, they coalesced around the “reinventing government” frame — namely that to reform a broken system like K–12 education, leaders needed to embrace a “tight-loose” strategy: tight about the results to be accomplished and loose about how people closer to the problem might get there. This was how business titans of the time steered their organizations, especially as the economy was shifting to knowledge work. To get the best results, people on the front lines had to have the autonomy to make decisions and solve problems themselves in real time rather than take orders from the top. They should be rewarded when they improved productivity accordingly. But if they failed to generate the desired results, unpleasantness might be expected to follow. They might even lose their jobs.

This struck a chord among some education scholars as well. As far back as 1966’s Coleman Report, we knew about the disconnect between education inputs and outcomes. If we wanted better results, it made sense to focus on the latter. Furthermore, many of the reforms embraced in the wake of 1983’s A Nation at Risk report tried to tweak inputs such as teacher salaries, course requirements, and days in the school year. In an era of stagnant achievement and widening achievement gaps, none of that seemed to be working. It was time, many thought, for something else.

By the early 1990s, the tight-loose frame was a big driver behind the charter schools movement and the notion of “accountability for results” for public schools writ large. Lamar Alexander, who was governor of Tennessee before becoming US secretary of education under George H. W. Bush, was apt to talk about “an old-fashioned horse trade”: greater autonomy for schools and educators in return for greater accountability for improved student outcomes. And it wasn’t just Republican governors who embraced this model; several Democratic ones did, too, especially southern governors such as Jim Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas). It helped that the Progressive Policy Institute—a think tank for the New Dems—supported this approach enthusiastically.

This version of standards-based reform had some overlap with O’Day and Smith’s systemic reform, especially when it came to the centrality of academic standards. But it put greater emphasis on the measurement of achievement against those standards—in other words, high-stakes testing—and especially on accountability measures connected to results. This reflected the thinking of both economists and political scientists, who thought that the right incentives might allow local schools and school systems to break through the political barriers to change. With enough pressure from on high, schools might finally put the needs of kids first rather than follow the lead of adult interest groups, especially unions. They would remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, for example, ditch misguided curricula, and untie the hands of principals. The assumption was that the major barrier to improvement was not incoherence or the lack of capacity per se, but small-p politics and, especially, union politics. Getting the incentives right by tying real accountability to results could take a sledgehammer to the political status quo in communities nationwide.

This made sense to some key actors on the political left as well, especially the Education Trust and other civil rights organizations. They bought into this version of standards-based reform but with an important twist: doing right by kids would be defined primarily as doing right by kids who had been mistreated by the education system. That meant Black, Hispanic, and low-income students especially. These reformers wanted to counterbalance the political power of the unions but also that of affluent parents and other actors who tended to steer resources to the children and families who needed them the least. They wanted to use top-down accountability to redirect money, qualified teachers, and attention to the highest-poverty schools and the most disadvantaged kids.

These various flavors of standards-based reform were all in the mix in the 1990s, with many public discussions in particular about the wisdom of a strategy focused on “capacity building” versus one that stressed “accountability for results.” The enactment of NCLB settled the debate; the accountability hawks won. Capacity building would mostly be put on the shelf in favor of a muscular, federally driven effort to hold schools accountable, especially for the achievement of the groups that most concerned civil rights leaders.

Enter No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush-era reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was the law of the land for an entire generation of students. The kids who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2002, nine months after then president George W. Bush put his signature on NCLB, were seniors in high school in December 2015 when then president Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (its reauthorized successor).

That’s not to say that the same policy was set in stone for those thirteen years. For the first half of its life, federal officials implemented it rather faithfully, but the second half came with major policy shifts driven by regulatory actions and what might be termed “strategic nonenforcement.” Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane.

“NCLB-classic”—which was the 2001 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—centered on the three-legged stool of standards, tests, and accountability. But those three elements were not treated with the same level of prescription. States had complete control over their standards—both in terms of the content to be included and in terms of the level of performance that would be considered good enough. Not so when it came to the tests—those had to be given annually to students in grades three through eight in reading and in math, plus once in high school, plus three times in science. And the assessments had to meet a variety of technical requirements.

But where NCLB’s designers really got prescriptive was around accountability requirements. They created a measure called adequate yearly progress, which judged schools against statewide targets for performance and decreed that subgroups of students—the major racial groups plus low-income kids, students with disabilities, and English learners—would need to hit those targets as well. If schools failed to achieve any of their goals in a given year, they would face a cascade of sanctions that grew more severe with each unsuccessful year. Students would have the right to attend other public schools in their same district and, eventually, to receive “supplemental education services” (i.e., free tutoring) from private providers. Districts were charged with intervening in low-performing schools with ever-increasing intensity.

NCLB had a plethora of other provisions, from mandating that schools hire only “highly qualified teachers” to bringing “scientifically based reading instruction” (now called the science of reading) to the nation’s schools. Some of these other pieces could be considered capacitybuilding efforts. But overwhelmingly, NCLB was about accountability for results. It assumed that with enough pressure, schools and districts would cut through the Gordian knot that was holding them back in order to raise the achievement of students, especially those from marginalized groups. That was the theory. And as we’ll get to in a moment, it partly worked.

But it also soon became clear that many schools and systems didn’t know what to do in response to the accountability pressure—or couldn’t steel themselves to make the requisite changes in long-established practices and structures. Some educators narrowed the curriculum, significantly expanding the time spent on math and reading at the expense of other subjects. Stories filled the nation’s newspapers about schools teaching to the test, canceling recess, even ignoring lice outbreaks, all because of the accountability pressures of NCLB. In perhaps the most notable education scandal, teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools district were found to have cheated on state-administered tests by providing students with the correct answers to questions and even changing students’ answers and modifying test sheets to ensure higher scores.

NCLB Evolves

As with most federal statutes, Congress was supposed to update NCLB after a few years. A reauthorization push in 2007 came close to doing so and would have made the law even tougher, but it fell apart under fierce opposition from teachers’ unions and other education advocacy groups. So the law lumbered on even as it became clearer to its strongest supporters, including then education secretary Margaret Spellings, that parts of it were becoming unworkable.

One of the major issues was that an increasing number of schools were failing to meet NCLB’s adequate yearly progress provisions. If tens of thousands of schools were deemed subpar, then the sting and stigma were lost, as was much of the motivation to do something to fix it. In particular, the law’s focus on achievement rather than progress over time was snaring virtually all high-poverty schools in its trap, given the enduring relationship between test scores and kids’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Now that annual tests were in place, and states had, with federal money and support, built more sophisticated data systems, it was technically feasible to measure individual students’ progress from one year to the next. Such measures were much fairer to schools whose students arrived several years below grade level. But these growth models weren’t contemplated back in 2001, so they weren’t allowed under the law.

Through a series of regulatory actions, Spellings (under George W. Bush) and Arne Duncan (under Obama) allowed states to make critical changes to their implementation of NCLB to address these concerns. They allowed growth models provided the models still expected students to hit “proficiency” within a few years. They loosened rules around supplemental services so that school districts could provide tutoring themselves rather than outsource it to private providers. The cascade of sanctions was replaced with a menu of intervention options and funded generously through the School Improvement Grants program—all meant to encourage “school turnarounds.” An Obama-era waiver program allowed states even greater flexibility to tinker with their accountability targets in return for commitments to embrace other reforms the administration supported.

Meanwhile, states were working to address another key issue with NCLB: its encouragement of low level academic standards and much-too-easy-to-pass tests. Because the law required states to set targets that would result in virtually all students reaching the “proficient” level by 2014, it incentivized states to set the proficiency bar very low. This, in turn, may have encouraged educators to engage in low-level instruction, with teaching to the test and “drill and kill” methods. It also provided parents with misleading information, as states told most parents that their children were “proficient” in reading and math, even if they were actually several years below grade level and nowhere near on track for college or a decent-paying career. In Tennessee, for example, the state reported that 90 percent of students were “proficient” in fourth-grade reading in 2009 while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had the number at 28 percent. Advocates came to call this the “honesty gap.”

Under the leadership of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, states started collaborating on a set of common standards for English language arts and math—what would eventually become the Common Core State Standards. The hope was that, by working together and providing political cover to one another, the states would finally set the bar suitably high—at a level that indicated that high school graduates were truly ready for college or career and that would encourage teachers to aim for higher-level teaching. It would certainly be hard for the effort to result in worse standards than what most states had in place. Multiple reviews of state standards over the years from the American Federation of Teachers, Achieve, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that they were generally vague, poorly written, and lacking in the type of curricular content that “systemic reformers” had envisioned so many years before.10 It wasn’t surprising, then, that so many educators reported teaching to the test. The tests became the true standards, and they were perceived to be of low quality too.

The Common Core standards were adopted by more than forty states in 2010 and 2011, changing the very foundation of NCLB’s architecture. No longer were states aiming to get low-achieving students to basic literacy and numeracy; now the goal was to get everyone to college and career readiness. But that shift was largely overlooked at the time, drowned out by a fierce political backlash to the Common Core. It mostly came from the right, as the newly emerging conservative populist movement seized on Obama’s involvement in encouraging the adoption of the standards (through his Race to the Top [RttT] initiative). Nonetheless, by 2015, more than a dozen states were using new assessments tied to the standards (largely paid for through RttT funds), and even today, most states still use the Common Core standards or close facsimiles.

So did standards-based reform work during the NCLB era?

As mentioned before, judging the success or failure of such a sprawling reform effort is hard to do. Thankfully, scholars Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research offered a wonderful overview of the research literature in a recent report for the US Chamber of Commerce, Looking Back to Look Forward: Quantitative and Qualitative Reviews of the Past 20 Years of K–12 Education Assessment and Accountability Policy. I strongly encourage readers to review their findings; allow me to summarize them here.

First, it’s clear that student achievement in the United States improved dramatically from the mid to late 1990s until the early 2010s—especially in math, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, and especially for the most marginalized student groups. Pointing to studies by M. Danish Shakeel, Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek, Ayesha Hashim, Sean Reardon, and others, Goldhaber and DeArmond conclude that “the long-term gains on the NAEP reveal a decades-long narrowing of test score achievement gaps between underserved groups (e.g., students of color, lower achieving students) and more advantaged groups (e.g., White students, higher achieving students).”

My own analysis of NAEP trends from that time period focused on the impressive gains made by the nation’s low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, especially at the lower levels of achievement. The proportion of Black fourth-graders scoring at the “below basic” level on the NAEP reading exam, for example, dropped from more than two-thirds in 1992 to less than half in 2015. Likewise, the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring “below basic” in math dropped from two-thirds in 1990 to 40 percent in 2015. Those numbers were still much too high, but the improvement over time was breathtaking.

Nor was it just student achievement. High school graduation rates shot up as well, climbing fifteen points on average from the mid-1990s until today. We saw major improvements in college completion, too, with the percentage of Black and Hispanic young adults with four-year degrees climbing from 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in 1995 to 23 percent and 21 percent by 2017. Some analysts have argued that these improvements might reflect a softening of graduation standards, but rigorous studies have found that a significant proportion of the gains were real.

Alas, the progress in test scores stalled in the early to mid-2010s, and achievement even declined in some subjects and grade levels in the late 2010s, before the pandemic wiped out decades of gains. As Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, this has led some analysts to argue that the rise and fall of test-based accountability can explain the rise and fall of student achievement.

That’s possible, but NAEP’s design makes it hard to know for sure. What scholars can do is compare states with various policies (and policy implementation timelines) to try to link the adoption of standards-based reform to changes in student achievement. That’s exactly what a series of studies did in the 2000s, including ones by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, another by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, and a seminal paper by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob. The latter compared states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the late 1990s to those that adopted it in the early 2000s, once NCLB mandated them to do so. Dee and Jacob found large impacts of those policies on math achievement (an effect size in the neighborhood of half a year of learning), with even greater effects for the lowest-achieving students as well as Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. The impacts on reading and science were null.

Another study, by Manyee Wong, Thomas D. Cook, and Peter M. Steiner, used Catholic schools as a control group and found more evidence that accountability policies raised achievement in math in the public schools. Other research, also reviewed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, looked at the impact of NCLB on the so-called bubble kids—the students who were closest to the proficiency line or the schools most at risk of sanctions. Most studies found the largest gains for such students and schools, for better or worse.

A brand-new study, by Ozkan Eren, David N. Figlio, Naci H. Mocan, and Orgul Ozturk, found that accountability policies had an impact on more than just test scores. “Our findings indicate that a school’s receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students’ reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s.”

Circumstantial evidence from individual states also points to a big impact from consequential accountability. Massachusetts, which combined standards-based reform with an enormous increase in spending in its 1993 Education Reform Act, saw student achievement skyrocket in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the much-remarked “Massachusetts miracle.” Fourth-grade reading scores increased by nineteen points from 1998 through 2007—the equivalent of about two grade levels. Eighth-grade math scores jumped thirty-one points from 2000 to 2009. With its high-quality academic standards, intensive supports for teachers, lavish funding, and new high school graduation exam for students, the Bay State showed what was possible.

Nor was Massachusetts alone. Other states made significant progress, too, including Texas and North Carolina in the 1990s, Florida in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi in the 2010s, and the District of Columbia throughout the entire reform period.

What we can say, then, is that NCLB-style accountability worked, at least for a while and at least in math. Nationally, it didn’t make an impact in reading, even though reading achievement was improving during the NCLB era (including in states like Massachusetts and Mississippi). We also aren’t sure if achievement plateaued in the 2010s because accountability necessarily stopped working or because accountability stopped.

It doesn’t help that we don’t have much evidence about the mechanisms that might have driven the gains Dee and Jacob (and others) found. Did schools improve their approach to teaching mathematics? Did they make more time for intensive interventions such as tutoring, especially for their lowest-performing kids? Did they work harder or smarter to support teachers and get their best folks where they were needed most? Why did accountability lead to gains in math but not in reading?

We only have a few studies on how these policies might have changed classroom practice. As mentioned above, it was widely perceived that schools—especially elementary schools, where the schedule is more flexible—narrowed the curriculum and spent more time on math and reading and less time on social studies and science. Several teacher surveys showed this to be the case.19 (Perhaps that’s one reason standards-based reform failed to move the needle on reading achievement, given the growing evidence linking content knowledge in subjects like social studies to improvements in reading comprehension.) The improvement of scores for bubble kids indicates that schools and teachers may have shifted their attention to kids near the proficiency line. And teaching to the test was also thought to be pervasive; some teacher surveys, for example, found that instruction became more teacher centered and focused on basic skills.

Alas, studying policy implementation all the way into the classroom is difficult and expensive. So save from surveying teachers about their practice—which is better than nothing but not terribly reliable—not much else was done. As a result, when it comes to changes that standards-based reform might have brought to the classroom, we have more questions than answers.

School improvement, school choice and school closure

In 2009, the Obama administration successfully lobbied Congress to allocate $3.5 billion (eventually growing to $7 billion) into the Title I School Improvement Grants program. This sum was directed primarily to the 5 percent of schools in each state with the lowest academic achievement. The federal government instructed districts to select from four intervention options, from replacing the principal to closing the school entirely. Most selected the least onerous option, and perhaps for that reason, a federal evaluation of the effort found no impacts on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

However, as Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, some local and state studies did find positive impacts arising from the SIG initiative. California’s implementation was particularly well studied by scholars including Thomas Dee, Susanna Loeb, Min Sun, Emily K. Penner, and Katharine O. Strunk.25 Both statewide and in particular cities, the results were generally positive, with improvements in both reading and math. This may be because California required its lowest-performing schools to implement more intensive interventions. It also focused a great deal of money—up to $1.5 million—on each school and gave the school lots of help in spending it well.

Though not addressed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, another place to look for lessons on accountability is the school choice movement. In particular, we can compare the relative success of charter schools with private school choice, given that the former operates under a strict accountability regime while the latter, in most states, does not. A growing body of research, including a new study from CREDO at Stanford University, shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion. That is especially the case for urban charter schools and for Black and Hispanic students.

Private school choice programs, on the other hand, have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana all show voucher recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes quite significantly. To be sure, another set of voucher studies finds positive long-term impacts on measures such as high school graduation and college enrollment. But the negative findings on achievement are still worrying and might reflect the lack of consequential accountability baked into these programs.

In the charter schools sector, authorizers are empowered to close low-performing or financially unsustainable schools, and they do so with regularity. This is real accountability, and the threat of closure very likely contributes to—perhaps even causes much of—the charter achievement advantage.

What’s less clear, once again, are the exact mechanisms. Does the threat of school closure encourage charter schools to improve? Perhaps—and a series of studies from the Fordham Institute and others have found that charter schools tend to embrace a variety of practices associated with improved achievement, from higher teacher expectations to greater teacher diversity to firmer policies around student discipline. On the other hand, it’s surely the case that school closures themselves automatically improve the performance of the charter sector, as the worst schools disappear, shifting the bell curve of achievement to the right. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that accountability plays a key role in the relative success of charter schools.

Unresolved tensions in standards-based reform

Accountability versus capacity building:

The most fateful decision in the history of standards-based reform might have been the move—cemented by NCLB — to place accountability at the heart of the strategy while largely neglecting capacity building; in other words, to assume that the only problem was the lack of will rather than skill. As Robert Pondiscio argues in chapter 5 of this series, that decision was particularly critical when it came to the issue of curriculum. Even those of us who believe in the importance of standards understand that they don’t teach themselves, nor do they provide day-to-day guidance to teachers on how to instruct students in an effective, engaging, evidence-based way.

Yet only in recent years have reformers embraced curriculum as a key lever for school improvement, with foundations and even states investing in building high-quality instructional materials and organizations such as EdReports judging them for alignment with rigorous standards. Imagine how much more progress we might have made had we embarked on these efforts twenty years earlier!

Yet that would have been hard to do, since back then states were just developing their standards, and they differed dramatically from one another even as most were of low quality. Only with the creation of the Common Core State Standards was there an opportunity to build a truly national marketplace for curricular materials, which is exactly what has happened in recent years. As high-quality products like Core Knowledge Language Arts and Eureka Math gain market share, we might be returning to the capacity-building effort we ditched so many decades ago. Perhaps fixing teacher preparation and professional development can come next.

It’s become clear that states need to show leadership around curriculum and instruction rather than sit back and hope districts make the right decisions on their own. States that have done so over the past twenty-five years—including, at various times, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Mississippi—have seen improvements in achievement (though, of course, correlation does not equal causation).

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?:

As with so much else about this topic, it’s hard to know whether there were particular components of standards-based reform that made a bigger difference than others. As explained earlier, seminal studies found that it was “consequential accountability” that led to test score gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which meant some sort of system to classify schools and some legitimate threat that something might happen to those deemed low-performing. My vague language is intentional. State policies, especially pre-NCLB, varied greatly, and yet scholars still detected an impact on achievement. We can say, then, that the threat of rating schools as poor and potentially taking action was enough to move the needle—at least when these policies were first introduced.

It’s likely, though, that when accountability systems were discovered to be mostly bark and no bite—because state officials were loath to follow through and actually shutter schools—these impacts faded. That brought us to a new stage, when the federal government spent billions of dollars through the School Improvement Grants program to turn around low-performing schools. This was a helping-hand approach rather than tough love, and as discussed earlier, it mostly didn’t work.

Nor can we make strong claims about the standards and assessments that are at the heart of standards-based reform. Scholars have failed to detect any difference in achievement in states that had low standards versus high ones or weak tests versus strong ones. As they say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It’s hard to believe that the quality of standards and assessments does not matter; rather, it’s more likely that to drive positive change, demanding expectations and tests must be connected to sophisticated school rating systems; meaningful accountability for results; and capacity-building efforts, like the introduction of high-quality curricular materials, to help students succeed.

The lesson for standards-based reform—and many other reforms as well—is that policymakers can’t view components as items on an à la carte menu. In order to drive improvements, it’s all or nothing. Especially in the push for “systemic,” coherent reform, the effort is only as strong as its weakest link. If the question is which is most important (standards, assessments, school ratings, consequences, turnaround efforts, or capacity building, especially around curriculum), the correct answer is “all of the above.”

Common standards versus student variation:

Other key issues that reformers often swept under the rug were (1) the inevitable conflict between the desire to set a single, high standard for achievement and the undeniable reality that kids come into school with widely varying levels of readiness and may need varying amounts of support and time to reach standard; and (2) that schools and school systems in the United States have historically underserved and under-supported students experiencing poverty and students with lower socioeconomic status.

The standards-based reform movement succeeded in promoting the idea that “all students can learn” and that we must reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” These are powerful and necessary maxims. But they rub up against the lived experience of educators, who must cope with the reality of classrooms of students who can be as many as seven grade levels apart on the first day of school.

Slogans about “holding schools accountable for results” elide critical questions over the details. Results for which students? All of them? Including the ones who start the school year way above or way below grade level? The embrace of “growth models” in the late NCLB period and under ESSA helped to circle this square. By focusing on progress from one school year to the next, accountability systems could give schools credit for helping all of their students make gains, no matter where they started on the achievement spectrum.

NCLB had an answer to this question, implicit though it may have been: the sharp focus of NCLB was on helping the lowest-achieving students—who tended to be Black, Hispanic, or low-income, or students with disabilities, or those still learning English—reach basic standards. And as discussed earlier, this focus worked for a time (again mostly in math) as those were the precise groups whose achievement rose the most during the 1990s and 2000s and who were much more likely to graduate from high school in the 2010s. But did this hyperfocus unintentionally incentivize the success and growth of some students over others? And was getting these students to a baseline level of proficiency setting them up for postsecondary success?

Tests as accountability metrics versus instructional tools:

Another key conflict throughout the standards-based reform era was the role of testing. To put it mildly, “high-stakes tests” were not (and are not) popular—with the general public, parents, and especially educators—even though “accountability” in education polls quite well.

The pushback to testing has been significant. Some of that stemmed from how schools responded to the tests—as discussed earlier, by “teaching to the test” or narrowing the curriculum. Some of it related to the Obama-era push to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Some of it focused on the tests themselves. Making kids sit for annual assessments from grades three through eight ate up precious instructional time. But since the results didn’t come back until months later—even until the next school year—they weren’t of much help to educators. They weren’t “instructionally useful.” Thus, most school districts opted to give students additional standardized tests, such as NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, in
order to receive real-time information about how students were doing. One study found students spending as many as twenty-five hours a year sitting for tests.

In recent years, some advocates and assessment providers have called for testing systems that can produce both accountability data and instructionally useful information for educators. That’s an understandable impulse, but trade-offs are unavoidable. Some approaches would assess students three times a year, for example—so-called through-year assessments—which might increase the testing load and encourage schools to adopt a curriculum closely aligned with the scope and sequence of the tests, for better or worse. Assessments that return results immediately, meanwhile, are by definition not graded by humans, and (so far at least) they can’t test the same higher-order skills that the better state assessments today can. This might encourage a return to low-level teaching of the skill-and-drill variety.

A key issue going forward is whether states will pursue these more instructionally useful assessment systems or simply acknowledge that we need a variety of tests, some to guide instruction and others to generate accountability data, as unpopular as the latter may be.

Lessons for the future

What can tomorrow’s policymakers learn from our experience with standards, assessments, and accountability?

• Be clear-eyed about capacity in the system. Some of us wrongly assumed that incentives were the only big problem—that once we put pressure on schools to improve, they would figure out how to help their students meet standards. What standards-based reform revealed, however, was how little capacity existed in many schools. Educators didn’t know how to boost achievement, or they only knew how to do this for some kids in their schools. They didn’t know what curricula to use. And accountability wasn’t generally strong enough to overcome the political incentives operating in the system, especially union politics. Reformers can’t wish realities like these away. Fixing perverse incentives is necessary but not sufficient; capacity building is needed too. And that means states need to take a more muscular role around issues like curriculum and teacher preparation than some of us once imagined.

• Be wary of any reform that is about “all” students (or all schools). Yes, all kids need to learn to read, write, and do math, and virtually all students can reach basic standards. But not all kids need to (or can be) college ready. Reforms that don’t come to terms with the huge variability in kids’ readiness levels, cognitive abilities, and prior achievements will lose popular support and will flounder.

• Don’t take success for granted! Especially in the wake of the awful COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous impact on our schools, it’s hard not to romanticize the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when achievement was skyrocketing. What we wouldn’t give to have those test score gains back! Yet the education debate at the time wasn’t full of celebration and confidence, but angst about things not moving quickly enough. What we need to remember is that education happens slowly, year by year, and we need to make sure that policy leaders stay on course over a long period of time. We should fight the urge to look for the “next big thing.” At the current moment, for example, there’s much enthusiasm about universal education savings accounts as new and exciting, in contrast to charter schools, which feel old and dated to some. Yet based on their strong track record, slowly but surely continuing to expand high-quality charter schools may be the best approach to improving student outcomes and expanding parental options. Policymakers, advocates, and philanthropists need to get better at finishing what we started.

• Scholars need new ways to study policy change all the way to the classroom. Thanks in part to the data produced by standards-based reforms, the field of education research has improved markedly in recent decades. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are much more common, and every day brings important new findings about interventions and their impact on student outcomes. Yet as this chapter demonstrates, we still struggle to follow policy changes all the way down to the classroom. But that doesn’t have to be a given. It’s now technically and financially feasible to put cameras and microphones in classrooms nationwide to collect detailed information about teaching and learning. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will soon allow us to analyze such data to gain insights about curriculum implementation, effective instructional strategies, grouping practices, student discipline, and much else. The question is whether we will have the political will to make this vision a reality while ensuring safeguards for teacher and student privacy.

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that standards-based reform in general, and NCLB in particular, didn’t work. That conventional wisdom is incorrect. These policies deserve some of the credit for the historically large achievement gains of the 1990s and 2000s and the equally impressive improvements in the high school graduation and college completion rates of more recent years.

But this approach to reform will work much better if it is combined with efforts to boost the knowledge, skills, and confidence of educators on the front lines. Providing high-quality instructional materials is arguably the best way to do that, and it’s an effort that states have finally embarked upon. This is still no panacea; the Gordian knot hasn’t been sliced through, nor have teachers’ unions disappeared, nor have we solved the riddle of how to get fourteen thousand school districts to embrace smart policies and practices. Systemic dysfunction remains. But a recommitment to accountability for results, along with a focus on making classroom instruction more coherent, effective, and equitable, could yield stronger results in the years ahead.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

A bill that would require high school juniors to take the ACT college entrance exam instead of a separate state assessment was tabled by the state House Education Committee on Friday at the Capitol in Pierre.

While a majority of testifiers supported , including the Department of Education, the bill’s prime sponsor Rep. Tony Venhuizen, R-Sioux Falls, recommended tabling it. That’s because Secretary of Education Joseph Graves said the department plans to switch to the ACT by the 2025-2026 school year anyway.

“I’m not a person who sees the need to put things into law unnecessarily” Venhuizen said. “… I just want to see this happen, and it sounds like it’s going to.”

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One person testified against the bill, saying it would degrade parents’ ability to make educational decisions for their children.

Education officials within state government have talked about making the switch to the ACT from the Smarter Balanced assessment for years, Venhuizen told legislators. That’s because the switch would reduce the number of tests most high school juniors take, would save families money if they want to send their children to college — since the state would be footing the bill — and would put more weight behind the students’ scores.

The ACT would be the best choice for a replacement test, Graves told lawmakers.

“Students don’t find any value in (the Smarter Balanced test),” Graves said. “Because they have no use for it – for the most part – they tend not to take the test seriously. This is a common complaint registered by high school principals and teachers. Because the test results don’t have any other use, then the value is low. We’re taking a test we use for accountability and that’s it.”

About 58% of South Dakota students take the ACT before graduating, since most colleges and universities require scores in the admission process and for scholarship applications.

South Dakota students’ average ACT score in 2023, but it remains higher than the national average. Testers earned an average composite score of 21.1 out of 36. Switching to the ACT for all 11th graders will likely lower the state’s score.

Some other states, like Nebraska and Montana, require 11th graders to take the ACT. States where 100% of 2023 high school graduates had taken the test had average scores .

ACT participation rates . During the 2022-2023 school year, 77% of white students took the ACT, 7% of Native American students took it and 5% of Hispanic students took it.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on and .

In his final go, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb wants to double down on K-12 literacy initiatives and bolster workforce training but won’t seek specific policy related to growing concerns around .

His reading plan could result in holding thousands more third-graders back a year in school.

The Republican governor on Monday unveiled his 2024 agenda, the last in his eight-year term. His policy goals additionally emphasize a need for expanded pre-K and childcare voucher eligibility, as well as increased access to disaster relief at the local level.

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Specifically, Holcomb’s agenda targets earlier access to IREAD-3 testing and ensuring Hoosier students are mastering foundational literacy skills. The latest reading scores showed that .

Currently, the IREAD-3 exam is only required in third grade. The governor’s administration is hoping to require testing in second grade, too. Doing so could help teachers and parents better identify struggling students and implement additional supports — such as through summer school or after-school tutoring — before kids get too far behind.

Students who fail the standardized exam can already be held back, but there are exceptions if a child is disabled or an English-language learner.

State officials — including Holcomb — maintain that too many Indiana third graders who can’t adequately read are advancing to the fourth grade. His agenda seeks to tighten up the state’s retention policy to require third grade students who fail IREAD-3 to be held back for at least one year, starting in 2025.

None of Holcomb’s priorities would require lawmakers to reopen the biennial state budget during the short legislative session, however.

“Ultimately, this (agenda) will be very interactive … looking through a lens of our customers, citizens and local leaders — how they may access all the programs that the legislature, year after year after year, appropriates dollars to. These are programs that really do make a difference,” he said during an agenda announcement at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually impaired in Indianapolis. “Whether it’s a local government or philanthropic organizations or local leaders, some don’t know about some of the programs. And so, how can we better connect chambers, local leaders, etcetera, in a very easy way?”

Indiana’s General Assembly reconvened Monday for the start of the 2024 session.

Legislative leaders they’re not taking on new and controversial subjects, promising a “quieter” non-budget session.

While Holcomb’s agenda is closely aligned with goals expressed last month by Republican legislative leaders, his policy recommendations leave out issues like Medicaid reimbursement rates, gambling, and regulation of large water transfers.

Improving literacy

An — with the force of law — dictates Indiana’s existing third grade retention policy.

According to data from the Indiana Department of Education, in 2023, 13,840 third-graders did not pass I-READ-3. Of those, 5,503 received an exemption and 8,337 did not. Of those without an exemption, 95% moved onto 3rd grade while only 412 were retained.

Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said Monday that adding a legislative piece will make clear what retention means, and include “the proactive approaches” schools should implement in kindergarten, first and second grades.

“This will just really add clarity for the state and also help us stay laser focused on the fact that we have to have students reading by the end of third grade,” Jenner continued, although she said the state board of education could make changes on its own, if it had to. “But I think there is a significant appetite with both the House and the Senate to look at potential legislation options.”

Holcomb’s goal is that 95% of students in third grade can read proficiently by 2027. State officials said they can still meet that mark — but only if immediate changes and early-warning systems are put in place.

A pilot program spearheaded by the state education department has already helped hundreds of Indiana schools administer IREAD-3 to second graders as a way to help parents and teachers determine if reading interventions are needed for younger students before they take the exam.

The 2022-23 school year was the second year schools could opt-in. The test — likely to rebranded as “IREAD” — was taken by almost 46,000 second graders. That’s up from about 20,000 second graders who tested the year before.

“It is a very, very popular option for schools because it provides whether the child can read, whether they’re on track, or whether they’re potentially at risk, and it provides that data at a younger age,” Jenner said. “That then can be used by the parent and the teacher to best support that child’s learning in the future.”

State officials noted that many students are expected to receive additional reading help during the summer.

Funding for summer school — equal to about $18.4 million per year under the current state budget — is mostly going toward students taking physical education and health courses in the summer, Jenner said.

“What an opportunity we have to better leverage that funding on the students who are not able to read or may not have numeracy skills,” she emphasized, adding that, for now, policymakers want to “focus on the current budget line that we have,” rather than appropriating new funds.

Although Jenner, Holcomb and Republican state legislative leaders have said that high rates of absenteeism are likely contributing to , policy to address student attendance and chronic absenteeism is not included in Holcomb’s agenda.

that about 40% of students statewide missed 10 or more school days last year, and nearly one in five were “chronically absent” for at least 18 days.

Even so, Holcomb said Monday that he will “participate in the discussion that the legislators might have” about attendance.

“I plead with parents to not underestimate the impact that your child not being in school has on them adversely, long-term. … We’re past COVID now, and so parents need to understand the adverse impact of keeping their child out of school,” the governor said. “There just is a correlation. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to realize that the less time you’re (in school), the less you’re going to learn.”

“We want to make sure that in this discussion of chronic absenteeism, that what we’re doing is going to make a difference,” Holcomb continued. “And I will continue to use my platform to plead with parents, begging them to make sure if their child can be in school, they need to be.”

The governor’s priorities also call for a mandatory computer science course to be completed by students before graduating high school. He additionally wants to task Indiana’s public colleges and universities with offering more three-year bachelor’s degrees, and make it easier for students to earn two-year associate degrees at the state’s four-year institutions.

Expanding child care

A multi-part plan to expand early childhood education and child care options is also high on Holcomb’s agenda.

The governor’s plan aims to increase the number of child care and early education providers across Indiana by adding credentialing training to state-sponsored grant programs and making more employees of child care entities eligible for On My Way Pre-K and Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) vouchers.

Holcomb’s administration further wants to reduce the minimum age of caregivers; from 21 to 18 for infant and toddler caregivers, and from 18 to 16 for supervised caregivers in school-aged classrooms.

“We know that to accommodate more kiddos in early learning environments, we need to have more workers there,” Holcomb said. “Dropping age limits down — that doesn’t mean dropping standards down. We think with the proper training and standards in place and oversight … you should qualify and be eligible to work there.”

Accessing disaster relief

Holcomb said Monday he will also work with legislators to help Hoosiers gain easier access to funds in the wake of both man-made and natural disasters.

Broadly, that means increasing the amount of relief dollars individual counties can receive, in addition to making it easier for individual Hoosiers to access aid.

The governor’s plan includes a proposal to allow some dollars from the State Disaster Relief Fund (SDRF) to help local units implement hazard mitigation plans that assist in protecting against future damages. Mitigation could come in the form of newly-built tornado shelters or participation in the National Flood Insurance Program, for example.

Counties with such plans in place could also qualify for increased reimbursement after a disaster.

Holcomb’s administration is also seeking to bump the maximum potential award for individual assistance from $10,000 to $25,000. Those funds can help Hoosiers with post-disaster damages and debris removal, among other needs.

Holcomb said he’s confident the state can afford to increase available aid, noting that Indiana’s disaster relief fund is financed by firework sales.

There would still be caps on how much could be dispersed, however, which officials said helps ensure the state fund isn’t depleted.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

One in five Hoosier third graders continue to struggle with foundational reading skills, according to new standardized test results released Wednesday.

(IDOE) shows 81.9% out of the roughly 82,000 third graders at public and private schools in Indiana passed the 2023 Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination, also called the IREAD-3 test. Tests were administered statewide this spring and summer.

The results are nearly stagnant , when 81.6% of students’ scores indicated reading mastery. The state education department’s goal is that 95% of students in third grade can read proficiently by 2027. As of this spring, 242 schools have reached that goal — an increase from 210 schools a year ago.

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Latest results indicate Indiana’s younger students also still lag behind pre-pandemic reading fluency.

Scores are 5.4% behind the results from the 2018-2019 school year, which is the last data set available prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indiana schools did not give standardized tests in 2019-2020 due to the pandemic.

Reading scores were on the decline even before the pandemic, however. The Hoosier literacy rate has seen a significant drop from Indiana’s high of 91.4% in 2012-13.

In total, about 13,000 Hoosier third grade students — more than 18% of those in the state — will need additional support to build their reading skills to meet grade-level reading standards, according to state officials. A student who does not pass the IREAD-3 test typically must receive remediation, or risk being retained in third grade.

The IREAD-3 scores roll in as the state shifts its literacy instruction to implement as part of an effort to improve students’ reading skills.

“We have to shoot high,” Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner told the Indiana Capital Chronicle on Wednesday. “We have a goal set — we know it’s aggressive, and we are following that with some very aggressive tactics to support our current and future teachers to try to engage our parents and families in getting kids to school.”

“It has to be everyone together to make sure kids can read,” she continued.

Disparities persist

Black and��multiracial students had the highest percentage gains, while Indiana’s Hispanic students recorded declining pass rates��from last year.

About 65.6% of Black students and 64% of English language learners passed the multiple-choice IREAD exam in 2023 — slightly more than in 2022, but still nearly 10% fewer than in 2019.

Hispanic students’ pass rates dropped from 69.8% in 2022 to 68.9% in 2023.

Reading proficiency additionally improved overall for third grade students receiving free or reduced-price meals by nearly a percentage point.

Special education students��had the greatest progress��boost — an increase of 2.1% from 2022, for a total of 54.9% passing the IREAD-3 exam in 2023.

Earlier this year, showed that��Indiana students lost nearly six months of learning in math and over four months in reading as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other Spring 2023 tests showed that only 30.6% of Hoosier students in grades 3-8 passed both the math and English sections of . While the standardized test results��, passing scores trailed more than six percentage points behind 2019′s pre-pandemic pass rates.

“It has to be an all-hands-on-deck��approach. Schools cannot do this alone,” Jenner said during a monthly State Board of Education meeting Wednesday, talking about an “urgent” need for coordinated statewide literacy efforts. “We’re going to do everything we can, everything in our power, to make sure kids can read, but we need everyone at the table, helping us with this — helping us get kids to school, helping us provide the other out-of-school supports that may be needed.”

Board member Scott Bess emphasized that some of the students struggling the most with reading “are also some of our fastest growing demographic populations in the state.”

“Indiana’s��economy depends on these��subgroups accelerating and catching up,” Bess said. “Because without that, as that population changes across the state …��there’s no hope.”

Other board members mentioned an ongoing lack of transportation for some Hoosier students — a barrier to getting to and from school.

But Pat Mapes, another board member, doubled down that the latest scores are partly a result of too few kids actually showing up to school.

“We’ve got to get better at attendance … our parent need to make certain their kids are present in the building,” he said. “Not when they’re ill — that’s something different. But we’ve got a lot of kids that just say, ‘I don’t want to go to school today,’ and nobody’s making them go to school. Not being in front of the classroom, with teachers, is detrimental to their work.”

Board member Katie Mote additionally suggested a partnership with the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council or collaborations with local judges to try a “carrot and stick approach” to compel students to get into the classroom.

Jenner said state education officials “have to lean in on that attendance conversation,” although she noted that it’s currently up to each Indiana county prosecutor to decide how to enforce truancy laws.

She told the Capital Chronicle that state leaders want to analyze statewide attendance data before making specific recommendations or calling on lawmakers for help in the 2024 legislative session. Even so, Jenner said state data shows that students who attend at least 169 days of the 180-day school year are “significantly” more likely to do well in school and score higher on standardized tests.

Will new science of reading initiatives be enough?

State lawmakers passed multiple new bills in the 2023 legislative session as part of an ongoing effort to reverse learning loss and increase academic proficiency.

That included a GOP-led effort approved by the state education department by the start of the 2024 academic year.

The phonics-based literacy approach��incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Education experts say it gives students the skills to “decode” any word they don’t recognize.

The state is also banning schools using the “three-cueing model,” which encourages students to make educated guesses at words using context clues. The model has been largely disproven by cognitive scientists but is still used by schools in Indiana and around the country.

The ongoing curriculum overhaul to center student learning and teacher training methods to the science of reading has so far included a pilot program, involving 54 schools around the state. During the 2022-2023 school year, literacy instructional coaches were placed in each school to help teachers train and put into practice science of principles.

The IREAD-3 pass rate among those schools was nearly 72% in 2023 — almost 2 percentage points higher than in 2022. Some schools that have already adopted the new curriculum saw even larger gains, however.

The continued science of reading shift will be paid for from a $111 million fund created late last year by the state and the Lilly Endowment, which donated $60 million to K-12 science of reading efforts and $25 million to teacher preparation programs. The state has chipped in $26 million from the state’s federal COVID relief dollars.

Additionally, Indiana’s next biennial budget adds up to $20 million in each of the next two years for education department’s efforts on science of reading.

Jenner said one of the most important steps forward is ensuring that Hoosier teachers have science of reading training — but not just for elementary educators.

Middle school and high school teachers — many of whom have not received special training in foundational literacy — are increasingly having to teach those skills to students who are unable to read.

“Every single educator, when they go into the classroom, they want to make a difference for kids,” Jenner told the Capital Chronicle. “We have to do everything we can to support our current teachers in in learning those strategies.”

Still, Jenner cautioned that it takes “more than a textbook” to get kids back on track. IDOE chief academic officer Charity Flores said a major turnaround for statewide literacy rates could be years down the line.

“We know that in many cases — for changes to typically occur once science of reading is inserted into a school building — that can take five to seven years. It takes time to train all of the educators, understand how that impacts curriculum and instruction, and how that impacts assessment. To see significant changes in the course of a year is typically very rare,” she said. “But for us to see some of these early indicators in some of the populations that we were really targeting with this effort is really exciting.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

The future of a bill that would effectively mandate kindergarten in Alabama still faces an uphill battle, even as members of a state education commission said that they support the bill.

During a Wednesday meeting of Governor’s Commission on Teaching and Learning — a group of educators, lawmakers and officials — State Superintendent Eric Mackey said the Literacy Act, if they are unable to read at grade level, has led many principals to focus on first grade.

The superintendent, in a presentation , said that some are retaining first graders if they believe they are at risk of retention later in their academic careers.

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“When you get that before third grade, that’s all the better, which is why I think what we hear from our principals are doing is largely focusing on first grade,” he said.

Mackey also said that principals want to learn who’s on track in those early years, but the assessments they have do not currently track as well with the state test.

Rep. Alan Baker, R-Atmore, had also said that it was important that they focus on grades before first grade.

“And that really captures really what it’s about, that is the prevention that is identifying those students early on, early as possible,” he said. “And then providing the necessary interventions and supports all the way through and not just waiting.”

Some commission members had questions about why kindergarten was not mandatory in the state and if there was a way to make it mandatory.

Carey Wright, former Mississippi State Superintendent of Education and a member of the panel, said that Mississippi had been able to mandate mandatory attendance for those who enrolled in kindergarten.

“And that helped a lot with our kindergarten in terms of first grade readiness,” she said.

The Alabama House of Representatives last spring passed a bill known as that would have required a student to pass kindergarten or an equivalent test showing readiness for first grade. The bill passed out of a Senate committee but did not come to the Senate floor for a vote.

Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva, said that the biggest opposition was “one senator,” as many in the room laughed.

Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, spoke multiple times in opposition to the bill. He said it felt like it would hold more students back.

Smitherman and the bill’s sponsor Pebblin Warren, D-Tuskegee, said they would discuss the bill further in the fall.

A message was left with Warren Wednesday afternoon. As of 2020, only 19 states and the District of Columbia required students to attend kindergarten, according to .

Smitherman, reached Wednesday afternoon by phone, said that his stance on the bill has not changed since the end of the legislative session. He said he is still planning to meet with Warren later this fall, though not in the next couple of weeks.

“It will be addressed, but right now, there’s no scheduled meetings at this time,” he said.

Smitherman cited concerns about the bill including retaining students and a lack of infrastructure to support the needs of first grade readiness, such as busing.

“It’s a great soundbite, and it’s a great, it’s an ambitious goal,” he said. “But we can’t help these children like we need to unless we put the proper structure, the proper resources, and have the proper instructors there.”

Supporters of the first grade readiness bill insisted during debates over the legislation that . But Brown, the Montgomery Public Schools superintendent, wondered why the state could not simply mandate kindergarten, without the extra test.

“What I’m imagining in my mind is: I’m going to get my driver’s license, and my test run is an IndyCar race,” he said. “If I crash, now, I got to go back to school to take the test. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I want to get them on the front end.”

“Some of us agree with you,” said Rep. Barbara Drummond, D-Mobile. “At least in the House.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

As an assistant district attorney in 2013, Willis turned heads in one of her first big cases: She helped convene a grand jury that indicted decorated Superintendent Beverly Hall and nearly three dozen other educators for cheating on state standardized tests. In the end, Willis brought a dozen cases to trial, with a jury convicting 11.

This week, Willis invoked the same statute — Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act — to indict Trump and 18 others in an alleged plot to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. 

In doing so, she offered a reminder of her role in a divisive chapter in the city’s recent history. While the former president that Willis is, among other things, “a rabid partisan,” the cheating prosecutions left fissures in her own community, where many say she stood up for children but others accuse her of turning her back on Black educators. 

‘Cooking the books’

Hall, the Atlanta superintendent, arrived in the district in 1999, eventually leading what she would call a data-driven turnaround. She told observers that under her tenure, Atlanta schools were “debunking the American algorithm that socio-economics predicts academic success,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

By 2009, her efforts had earned her one of education’s top honors: . But the same year, the Journal-Constitution the first of several stories analyzing Atlanta’s results on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The analysis found that scores had risen at rates that were statistically “all but impossible.” It also found that district officials disregarded internal irregularities and retaliated against whistleblowers. 

Critics would soon compare Hall to “a Mafia boss who demanded fealty from subordinates while perpetrating a massive, self-serving fraud,” the city newspaper reported at the time. Willis pursued Hall using the same tools many prosecutors employ against Mafia bosses and drug kingpins. In bringing charges under the state’s RICO Act, Willis alleged that Hall and her colleagues used the “legitimate enterprise” of the school system to carry out an illegitimate act: cheating.

Lonnie King, a former head of the local NAACP, the newspaper that when he looked at the data, “I thought Beverly Hall was cooking the books” as early as 2006.

The newspaper’s coverage led Gov. Sonny Perdue to appoint a team of special investigators, who conducted 2,100 interviews and reviewed 800,000 documents. By 2011, they uncovered cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined, concluding that 178 educators participated. Investigators eventually found widespread tampering with test papers and concluded that Hall stood at the center of “a culture of corruption.”

Special investigator Michael Bowers, a former state attorney general, in 2013 that interrogating teachers in the scheme had left him in tears.

“The thing I remember most was talking to some of the teachers who had been mistreated, mostly single moms,” he said. “And it’s heartbreaking. They told of how they had been forced to cheat.” One told him, “I had no choice.”

‘On the backs of babies’

Hall retired in 2011, but on March 29, 2013, a Fulton County grand jury indicted her and more than 30 others in what Willis called a conspiracy comprising administrators, principals, teachers and even a school secretary.

Similar to this week’s indictments, the Atlanta defendants faced charges of racketeering, conspiracy and making false statements. Hall also faced theft charges because her rising salary was tied to test scores — in 2009, the year she was named Superintendent of the Year, she got , prosecutors noted.

If convicted, Hall could have served as many as 45 years in prison, but she soon fell ill and the judge in the case indefinitely postponed her trial. At an April 2014 hearing, Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador, rose in the courtroom and asked the judge to be “merciful” and drop the case against her.

“Let God judge her,” he said.

Hall died of breast cancer in 2015, at age 68.

Public opinion on the case was sharply divided, with many Black commentators accusing Willis of overreach. But eventually, 34 of Hall’s subordinates faced criminal charges.

Brittney Cooper, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, : “Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here.”

Cooper noted that former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is Korean-American, had also been for creating a “culture of fear about test scores.” An by USA Today revealed findings similar to Atlanta’s, but an inspector general report found of widespread cheating and Rhee never faced prosecution.

While most of the Atlanta educators eventually pleaded guilty to avoid jail time, 12 went to trial in 2014. As with the Trump case, this one was complex: Jury selection took more than , and jurors sat through complex statistical analyses of answer-sheet erasure patterns, among other matters. At a few points in the trial, a dozen or more lawyers offered different versions of events.

In an early case that went to trial in 2013, Willis said supervisor Tamara Cotman worked to protect educators’ jobs by advising principals under investigation not to cooperate with state investigators — a charge Cotman denied — and by vowing to return high test scores at any cost.

“She did it on the backs of babies,” Willis during closing arguments. The jury acquitted Cotman, who was later convicted of other charges in the larger case.

In court, Willis told the jury of “cheating parties” at which educators got together to erase children’s incorrect answers on test sheets and pencil in correct ones. At a few of the parties, she said, educators “ate fish and grits — I can’t make this up.” 

The jury convicted 11 of the 12 of racketeering and other charges.

The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, at the time senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church — he now serves as a U.S. Senator — The New York Times, “There’s no question that this has not been our finest hour. It’s a dark chapter, but it’s just that. It’s a chapter.”

In 2015, commentators Van Jones and Mark Holden that the educators convicted in the case were “the latest victims of overcriminalization,” facing serious jail time because of Willis’s “unprecedented use” of RICO. Three were sentenced to seven years in prison, they noted, while others received one- or two-year sentences if they didn’t accept plea deals. 

“These punishments do not fit the crimes,” they wrote. 

Since then, several of the defendants have loudly proclaimed their innocence, even as they’ve served prison time or pursued appeals to avoid it. A handful of those cases remain outstanding. In several instances, they and their defenders say they’ve spent their life savings pursuing appeals.

In 2019, Shani Robinson, one of those found guilty, about the ordeal. In an interview, , “the thought of being blamed for something that I did not do is horrifying. … I felt like if I was on the right side of justice, that one day I would be vindicated. That was the moment that I decided that I would never take a plea deal.”

But many parents saw it differently.

Shawnna Hayes-Jocelyn had three of her four children in classes at schools affected by the cheating. She said Willis rightly brought RICO charges. 

“You’d better believe she did the right thing, because that was the worst Black-on-Black crime example that could have ever happened around education,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Because what they did to those children is that they didn’t give those children options and opportunities.”

Hayes-Jocelyn said her mind was made up once she read the state report that alleged widespread cheating among educators. 

“When I read that report and saw what was happening in that school system, yeah, people said, ‘Oh, this is RICO. We think about RICO as organized crime.’ I said, ‘This was organized crime.’” 

Those familiar with Willis’s work say she’s tenacious. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs, one of the defense attorneys in the cheating trial, told The Guardian this week that Trump is “going to be very surprised when he’s sitting across from her for months on trial. He’ll find out how great of a lawyer she really is.”

Asked in 2021 if she had regrets about pursuing the school cheating cases, Willis was blunt, the Times that by going after teachers, principals and administrators, she was “defending poor Black children.” Public education, she said, offers these children their only chance to get ahead. “So if what I am being criticized for is doing something to protect people that did not have a voice for themselves, I sit in that criticism, and y’all can put it in my obituary.”

The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, are meant to usher in competency-based forms of schooling that would allow students to proceed through academic material at their own pace. Leaders of both organizations hope they will also capture a broader array of non-cognitive qualities, like teamwork and relatability, that are highly prized in the modern workforce but undetectable through conventional academic metrics like grade point average or school attendance. 

The adoption of more personalized instruction and assessment has faced a key obstacle in the form of , the namesake foundation’s strict definition of annual credit hours that students must accrue to demonstrate their grasp of material. (The calculation essentially breaks down to one hour of seat time per day, per subject, for 24 weeks.) Though largely unknown outside the education world, many high schools and universities have based their academic requirements on the Carnegie Unit . 

But Timothy Knowles, the foundation’s president, said that while the Carnegie Unit had served a useful purpose at one point, new discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have proven that pupils learn different subjects at highly variable rates. What’s more, he added, the capacity now exists to test for valuable qualities that were previously invisible to admissions officers and employers.  

“We’re in a position to do something that we hadn’t before,” Knowles said. “Unlike 20 years ago, we can actually reliably measure the skills that we know are predictive of success in postsecondary education and work.”

Competency-based learning and assessment has long been theorized as a preferable alternative to existing educational models, which critics describe as too standardized to deliver instruction to individual students with vastly divergent levels of academic preparation. Instead, they allege, the status quo came to reflect the production processes of 20th-century industry, with students replacing widgets as the product. In , Knowles himself telegraphed his desire to phase out the Carnegie Unit, calling time a “crude” metric to determine educational attainment.

With a range of philanthropic and education-focused advocates backing the movement, has promoted some version of competency-based policies. Those efforts hit in Maine, where high school graduation requirements were refigured over the last decade to emphasize proficiency on subject material. But disputes over the definition of proficiency and teachers’ differing grading standards led many to question the new approach, with legislators later backing away from the competency-based model.

Similarly rocky transitions were seen in and , which attempted similar shifts. The central puzzle facing critics of the current model (i.e., calendar-centered requirements and standardized assessment) is what will come to supplant it. 

Scott Marion, president of the , said that the challenge in executing the hoped-for switch to competency-based learning lay in designing realistic measures of achievement to replace existing tests. To deliver on advocates’ promises, he observed, such measures would need to be both tailored to individual students and academically credible.

“Competency-based assessment is not for the faint of heart,” Marion said. “It’s being done quite poorly in a lot of places. So if ETS and Carnegie can bring a little more rigor to it, it might be good.”

With interest in competency-based approaches growing, more players have leapt into the field, with the best-known among them that developed a “mastery transcript.” The project has gained adherence among high schools over the last year.  

The ETS-Carnegie proposal is also emerging at a time when traditional high school admissions exams, such as the SAT and ACT, have lost significant market share. Both the aftereffects of the pandemic and concerns about inequitable outcomes from standardized testing to go test-optional in the last few school years. With those leading indicators of secondary achievement potentially passing from the scene, demand is expected to rise for measures that could take their place.  

ETS, which administers the widely used GRE, PRAXIS, and TOEIC tests, during and after the pandemic.

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over the newly announced partnership is the proposed measurement of not just cognitive and behavioral skills — including everything from comprehension of math content to teamwork and leadership — but so-called “affective” skills as well. As described by ETS head Amit Sevak at the educational technology conference ASU-GSV, such skills could include something like emotional intelligence, or the ability to successfully convey sincerity and empathy to others. Just how those kinds of competencies can be conveyed to students, let alone measured by third parties, is debatable even to backers of competency-based instruction.

Michael Horn, a cofounder of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, said he would be watching the development of such measures carefully.

“This part, from my reading of the literature on assessment, is both unproven and underdeveloped. So the how is going to be very important,” Horn said. “I’m going to be very curious to see what the investments look like as they go forward, and I hope they don’t overpromise.”

While no concrete timeline has been released for the conception of the new suite of assessments, Carnegie and ETS to conduct a multi-state pilot that could begin as early as next year. In an interview, Sevak said he envisioned students being able to access a digital “transcript” detailing their ongoing growth in areas like collaboration and creativity. Real-time data could build their awareness of their comparative strengths and weaknesses, he added.

“That more holistic approach is in contrast to much of the assessments in K–12 and higher education, which are really cognitive-driven and tied to logic and reason,” Sevak said. We’re looking at a more holistic approach that is more tied to the future of work.”

After three years of challenges caused or aggravated by the pandemic — closed schools, staffing shortages, students with burnout — New Jersey lawmakers are taking a closer look at whether high schoolers should pass an exam to graduate.

New Jersey is one of 11 states that require students to pass a standardized test in 11th grade in order to get their diploma. Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law , and now some lawmakers want to make that a permanent move.

“No way should this test be on the books for 2024, because we still haven’t resolved the issues that our students have gone through in 2021, 2022, and 2023,” said Assemblyman Ralph Caputo, (D-Essex) sponsor of a  to eliminate the requirement.

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For nearly two hours Thursday, the Assembly Education Committee heard testimony from dozens of parents, school officials, and students who argued the state should not require 11th graders to pass a standardized test to graduate. Education advocates say students of color, students who speak English as a second language, and students with disabilities struggle with testing and tend to score much lower than their peers.

Jamil Maroun, superintendent of Manville Public Schools, where 47% of students are bilingual and 35% speak Spanish as their primary language at home, said standardized tests reveal the inequities between schools. The assessments are discriminatory against students from certain socio-economic backgrounds and students who speak other languages, he said.

The tests, he added, are designed for some students to fail and are a “barrier” hurting students.

“I would agree that we need to provide some sort of measure, but shouldn’t we ensure that that measure truly measures the quality of the educational programs that the students are receiving, not the wealth and poverty that they’re coming from? This is an equity issue,” he said.

In December, state education officials released results for the graduation exam that showed 39% of juniors who took the language arts test were ready to graduate, and 50% passed the math portion.

Caputo said the test adds to student and teacher stress, driving mental health concerns that have worsened during the pandemic. Nicole Asamaro, a Jersey City teacher who has a daughter with ADHD and anxiety disorders, said she’s seen her daughter panic over tests that don’t reflect whether she’s a good student.

“Even when she studies, she still somehow manages to fail. The teachers can’t understand why she fails when they know she knows the material … She will leave her test papers completely blank because her anxiety overcomes her ability to perform well on exams,” said Asamaro.

Asamaro works with Save Our Schools New Jersey, which advocates for fewer standardized tests in schools and other education policies.

As an educator working with students who have autism, she added, she prefers using assessments where students demonstrate what they can do rather than race to circle multiple-choice answers during a timed test.

The current form of the test is known as the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment, but it’s been previously known as NJSLA, NJTPA, PARCC, or NJASK. The requirement comes from a  that mandates the testing requirement.

The testing requirement was waived in the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years as well due to the pandemic.

The 2022 law Murphy signed allowed the assessment to be used as a field test, the year the newest version of the test was first administered. The State Board of Education the Graduation Proficiency Assessment for 11th graders through at least the class of 2025.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

In a new survey released Tuesday by , a Massachusetts-based think tank focused on public engagement, respondents ranked preparation for college or university nearly at the bottom of their priorities for schools: 47th out of 57 overall.

As recently as 2019, prepping for college ranked No. 10 nationwide, just below learning “from exposure to different ideas and beliefs.” That priority also dropped a bit, to No. 27.

Instead, the findings show, Americans now want something very different from K-12 education: a concentrated focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

Top 10 Purpose of Education Rankings

“I think the takeaway is: The American public wants ‘different,’ not just ‘better’ from education,” said Todd Rose, a former Harvard University scholar and Populace’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s pretty clear that there’s a different set of outcomes that they are expecting.”

While college prep should be an option, he said, the data show that “it certainly can’t be the point” of K-12 education going forward. 

Part of that shift comes as Americans realize the diminishing economic value of both a high school diploma and a college degree, Rose said.

A college degree, he said, has always been viewed as a key path to a better, more high-paying career. “It’s not clear that that value is there from college anymore. So then when you pile on the outrageous cost … and the debt you’re incurring, it’s just not true. The value proposition isn’t there anymore.”

So it’s natural for the public to look to K-12 schools for other, more practical priorities, he said.

To be fair, this particular set of skills, with its real-world focus, has sat atop the Populace scale since 2019, along with aspirations that students learn to think critically, “demonstrate character,” and do basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

But the precipitous fall of college prep is significant — and widespread. Actually, respondents with college degrees were nearly as likely as high school graduates or even dropouts to give college prep a low priority score: It ranked 48th for college graduates, vs. 49th for high school graduates and dropouts. The figure was slightly higher — 39th for those with graduate degrees.

To Rose, that finding suggests a “broader zeitgeist shift” about college, one coming even from its graduates, who believe that in its current state, “This thing is untenable. It’s just too expensive.”

The survey of 1,010 adults was conducted Sept. 12-30. Pollsters also surveyed 1,087 parents separately. Researchers asked participants to imagine rebuilding our K-12 education system “entirely from scratch based on the purpose of education as you define it.” Then it set out pairs of priorities that participants ranked.

The data on college preparation suggest that the drop is driven largely by attitudes about higher education among one large group: White respondents, who placed it 46th overall in 2022. By contrast, Black and Hispanic respondents both placed it near the middle of the pack, 22nd out of 57 priorities. Asian respondents placed it relatively high at 9th place.

Even before the pandemic, attitudes about college-going were beginning to fray, research suggests. In 2019, the found that only half of American adults believed colleges and universities “are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” Nearly 4 in 10, or 38%, said colleges were having a negative impact, up from 26% in 2012.

Rising college costs are, of course, a big factor: At public four-year colleges in 2020, average tuition and fees were than in 2010, according to the U.S. Education Department. 

The rise in negative views, Pew said, arose “almost entirely” from Republicans and independents who lean Republican, with 59% saying colleges have a negative effect on the nation.

Overall, undergraduate between 2009 and 2020, according to the department, from 17.5 million students to 15.9 million. But it’s expected , to 17.1 million students by 2030.

Rose said even the oft-invoked culture wars over “indoctrination” of college students may actually be a function of higher education’s larger failures. “If college was still delivering on the value proposition, of the kind of careers that make for your little slice of the American dream, I don’t know that anyone cares” about indoctrination, he said.

More Rankings of Note

As for priorities in the Populace survey broken down by race, the results reveal a few interesting details: White respondents’ top priority was for schools to teach “practical, tangible skills” — managing finances, preparing meals and the like. In that sense, they basically track with mainstream priorities.

By contrast, Black respondents’ No. 1 priority was thinking critically, while for Hispanic respondents it was allowing students to advance in school “if they meet minimum grade requirements.”

Asian respondents’ top priority: Giving all students “the option to choose the courses they want to study based on interests and aspirations.” That indicator actually fell in importance overall, from No. 2 in 2019 to No. 9 in 2022.

Another big change since 2019: Americans now ­­largely distrust standardized tests, prioritizing how a student ranks against others on such exams even lower than college prep: 49th out of 57 priorities. They’re much more likely to prioritize teacher-administered exams, projects or “performance in real-world applications,” according to the survey.

And they have a new-found appreciation for mastery learning: The idea that “Students advance once they have demonstrated mastery of a subject” jumped from 30th out of 57 priorities in 2019 to 7th in 2022.

Part of that is doubtless due to the forced homeschooling that millions of families found themselves taking part in during the spring of 2020, Rose said. That changed families’ priorities about the purpose of schooling, almost overnight. 

“The pandemic affected our experience with education,” he said. “It put kids back in the home, with parents who watched their kids learn online, if at all. And like most public shocks to systems, it tends to lead to a rethinking: ‘What is it that matters to us?’”

For these families, the experience taught them, “It’s not simply, ‘How do we get kids better test scores and get them into college?’” Going forward, Rose said, “That is not going to be good enough.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Populace and ����Ӱ��.

Exam-takers averaged 19.8 out of a possible 36 total points on the college admissions test, the first time since 1991 that nationwide results dipped below 20. 

“There is no way to sugar coat these ACT results,” Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, told ����Ӱ��. “College entrance exam scores have plummeted, reflecting substantive holes in student knowledge and abilities.”

Scores for students from low-income families were particularly worrisome. Those youth, who in many cases had to pick up part-time jobs during virtual learning or help out with child care, scored 17.4, on average. Only 8% hit college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects — math, reading, English and science — compared to nearly a quarter of their more affluent peers.

Declines can’t be attributed solely to the pandemic, experts say, as ACT scores have been decreasing since 2018. But the pattern has accelerated since COVID hit.

“The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a .

The numbers provide new insight into the educational harms older learners experienced during the pandemic, said Thomas Dee, professor of education at Stanford University. In early September, the release of 9-year-olds’ reading and math scores via the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed unprecedented declines in learning among younger students, but until now there’s been less documentation of the impacts for high schoolers, he said.

“​​These latest [ACT] data should remind us to pay attention also to the experiences of recent graduates who spent most of their high school years under pandemic conditions,” Dee wrote in an email.

Samantha Farrow, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, said the standardized tests she’s taken identified gaps in her learning from the pandemic — Algebra 2 especially, which she took when classes first went online in the spring of 2020. She sat for the SAT rather than the ACT, but said many of her friends took both exams and found them difficult.

“There was still stuff in the SAT, like the Algebra 2 stuff, that I was just like, ‘I have no idea how to do it,’” she said. “I self-studied, too. I used Khan Academy, I did all that stuff. I just didn’t know how to do it. It’s just stuff that we missed.”

The college admissions testing landscape has changed in recent years. About one-third fewer high school grads took the ACT in 2022 than in 2018, as many institutions have become test-optional and an increasing share of young people choose to forgo higher education. Six states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming — administer the exam to all students.

Amid widespread pandemic disruptions, which hit the most vulnerable students the hardest, declines in ACT results should hardly be unexpected, said Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

“While these scores are alarming, they are certainly not surprising,” he wrote in an email. “School leaders and educators are doing everything they can. … We need our federal leaders to double down on supporting the academic and mental health needs of our students.”

In fact, schools across the country received an unprecedented windfall from the U.S. government’s COVID relief spending, with a total of $190 billion meant to revamp schools’ infrastructure and help students recover from pandemic losses.

“The trick now,” wrote Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, “is to face up to the enormity and urgency of the challenge while still recognizing that we do have the tools to act now to fix this.”

Texas students’ standardized test scores in reading and math moved closer to pre-pandemic levels after falling to levels not seen in a decade the year before, according to results released Friday by the Texas Education Agency.

Each spring, Texas students take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness or STAAR test. In math, 40% of all students in grades 3-8 met grade level or above this year, a 5-percentage-point increase from the previous year. In reading, 52% of all students met grade level or above, representing a 9-percentage point increase from the previous year.

“This gives you a picture of what has happened statewide with regard to student proficiency and it is largely a story of recovery. It is a story of hope,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said. “It is evidence that we have extraordinary people working in public schools in Texas.”

Brian Woods, superintendent of the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, credits students’ return to their physical classrooms and the work teachers have put in this past year despite disruptions caused by the spread of COVID-19, for the rise in scores.

“Let’s give the credit where credit’s due,” Woods said.

Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after the , who showed slight improvement.

The STAAR had a 98% participation rate this year among all students. Last school year, STAAR exams were optional for students, and districts weren’t rated based on the results. This year though, the scores will count and according to the results. Accountability results for school districts are scheduled to come out in August.

School administrators scores wouldn’t see much improvement this past school year because of school disruptions caused by surges delta and omicron surges. Already understaffed school districts had teachers and substitutes out with COVID, prompting many districts to ask parents to fill in.

While the 2021-22 scores showed improvements in math for third- through eighth-graders current math levels remain 10 percentage points under the 2019 math levels. Texas had been making successful strides in math scores since 2012, when only 34% of students met grade level or above.

It was different with reading, as this school year’s results surpassed those seen in 2019 and in the last decade.

By race, Hispanics, more than half of Texas’ 5.4 million public school students, saw gains as well, as 44% met grade level or above in reading, an 9-percentage-point increase from the previous school year and a 4-percentage-point increase from 2019. In math, 34% met grade level or above, an 8-percentage-point increase, but still 11 percentage points off their 2019 level.

Among Black students, 25% met grade level or above in math, a 5-percentage point increase from the previous year. In the same subject in 2019, 34% met or exceeded their grade level. In reading, 40% of students met grade level or above, an 8-percentage-point increase and 5-percentage-point increase from 2019. Black students represent about 13% of all Texas public school students.

English language learners and special education and economically disadvantaged students also improved their scores in reading and math.

In math, 30% of all economically disadvantaged students met grade level or above, a 7-percentage point increase from the previous year. But, this is still a 11-percentage point decrease from their 2019 scores, right before the pandemic hit.

In reading, 41% of all economically disadvantaged students met grade level or above, a 10-percentage-point increase from the year before and a 5-percentage-point increase from 2019.

While there were gains for these students, a significant gap still exists between them and non-economically disadvantaged students. In math, 55% of students who aren’t economically disadvantaged met grade level or above. In reading, 67% met grade level or above.

Among English language learners, 29% met grade level or above in math, a 9-percentage-point increase from the year before. In reading, 31% met grade level or above in reading, an 11-percentage point-increase.

For special education students, 13% met grade level or above in math, a 1-percentage-point increase from the previous year. In reading, 17% of these students met grade level or above, a 5-percentage-point increase.

Morath said the improved scores were the result of Texas teachers’ strong commitment this year and help from the Texas Legislature, specifically, which requires schools to offer students 30 hours of targeted instruction based on how many STAAR subjects a student failed. He also credited the state-mandated teacher training called . Teachers who teach K-3 must complete this training as part of an effort to improve student reading scores.

Historically, Texas hasn’t been the best at catching students up after a major school disruption. Students affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 didn’t meet state standards in reading until four years after the hurricane hit, and they never got there in math, according to the TEA.

In the latest , known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” in Texas performed at or above proficient level, and only one-quarter of eight graders performed at or above proficient level.

Woods, Northside ISD superintendent, said implementing HB 4545 has been difficult as school districts continue to struggle with staffing shortages. Once school is back with no COVID disruptions, Woods believes there is going to be more rapid improvement.

“Teachers are just simply going to have more time with students,” he said. “That’s the key.”

This article originally appeared in is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.