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.”

Equitable grading practices strive to make grades more accurate and fair by removing bias and separating behaviors — like handing in a late paper — from academic mastery or understanding the subject matter. The educators were polled as part of the first nationally representative teacher survey on the issue that was conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in partnership with RAND. 

“Lenient grading, grade inflation. It kind of feels like maybe it doesn’t really matter that much, and it’s a victimless crime or something,” said Adam Tyner, who authored on the survey and is the national research director at the Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education reform think tank. “But it actually has real consequences for students.”

He pointed to demonstrating that when teachers lower standards, students learn less.

“I hope people will listen to the teachers and really take it seriously that there are legitimate concerns with some of these policies that need to be aired out and discussed,” he added.

At a last week hosted by the Fordham Institute and education nonprofit , researchers met to discuss the report’s findings. Adam Maier, analytics director at TNTP, noted that “these practices are attempting to solve a real problem.”

Current, traditional grading models send kids mixed signals that don’t accurately reflect their achievement, he said. In the process of addressing these concerns, though, reformers are “stripping away some of the other useful things about grades.”

To understand the implications, researchers asked teachers about five policies, which they said they took from Joe Feldman’s 2018 book and deemed to be particularly “controversial.” Those included:

• No zeros — Mandates that teachers assign a minimum grade of 50% (or something similar) for missed assignments or failed tests.
• No late penalties — Gives students the right to turn assignments in late without penalty.
• Unlimited retakes — Gives students the right to retake tests/quizzes without penalty.
• No homework — Prohibits teachers from including homework assignments in a student’s final grade.
• No participation — Prohibits teachers from basing any part of a student’s grade on class participation.

At least a quarter of teachers said their school or district had adopted each of the three most common practices: unlimited retakes, no late penalties and no zeros. This was especially true for middle school educators, about 40% of whom reported they were in use.

While teachers didn’t support the majority of the policies, some were particularly unpopular, such as mandating a minimum 50% grade, regardless of work completed. The vast majority of educators surveyed (81%) said this was “harmful,” a trend which held true regardless of the teacher’s race, years of experience or the race of the students. 

This criticism was mirrored in the open response portion of the survey, where it was “the most mentioned—and most widely ridiculed—grading policy,” according to the report.

“I don’t believe there was a single unambiguous comment in support of no zeros or minimum grading,” Tyner said.

“We have gone to the ‘Do nothing, get a 50’ grade policy,” wrote one teacher. “Students have figured out that, if they work hard for a quarter (usually the first) they can ‘coast’ the rest of the year and get a D.”

Feldman, who authored the book on these practices, challenged the findings in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, arguing that the survey’s authors misrepresented his theories and practices.

“What they seem to have asked is what are the teachers’ opinions of equitable grading practices when we deliberately mischaracterize and oversimplify the practices, and regardless of whether the teachers were trained to use the practices or even know what they are,” Feldman said.

In an emailed statement, Tyner refuted this claim saying, “We do subject all of our work to external peer review, and this report was reviewed by Dr. Sarah Morris, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the implementation of these policies.”

Feldman did note that there’s been a tendency within districts and schools to oversimplify the practices, especially in cases where, “they were searching for a quick solution during the pandemic or they were just jumping on the equity bandwagon.”

When that happens, and educators are mandated to use flawed versions of the practices, it unsurprisingly doesn’t go well — a sentiment he thinks may be reflected in the survey results.

“There was pushback and a lot of resentment and misunderstanding and [it] sort of collapsed or exploded,” he said.

‘Dooming it to failure’

Educators have long grappled with how to accurately and fairly assess students, and debates about the benefits of “traditional” versus “equitable” grading practices are not new, though they have become particularly divisive in the years since the pandemic. 

Researchers have been studying these reforms and standards-based grading for decades and argue that, when implemented correctly, they should more accurately reflect what students know and correct for both inflating — and deflating — grades. 

But, a misunderstanding of the true principles, a lack of proper training for educators and a rush to quickly adopt a complex new system has often led to messy execution, according to experts.

“The ideas … on the surface are good, but it’s just that adaptations or nuances and caveats need to be taken into consideration when you move to implementation,” said Thomas Guskey, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky’s College of Education and a leading expert on grading and assessments.

Guskey said the survey results track with what he’s heard from district leaders across the country who are trying to use Feldman’s policies. Guskey is optimistic, though, that people will be able to distinguish between grading reform efforts as a whole and Feldman’s practices in isolation.

“My great fear,” he said, “is that people will look at this, and they will see these five particular aspects of ‘grading with equity’ as being corrupted … What I hope is that it prompts people to probe these more deeply, understand the nuances behind them and see what adaptations need to be made within each of the five to make sure it does succeed.”

Tyner agreed that there were rigorous ways to implement standards-based grading and more equitable practices.

“Not everything associated with trying to make grading more fair or more equitable or more accurate is lowering standards,” he said, “And I think we should absolutely advocate for those policies.”

In a Tyner released last year, he looked at 14 different equitable practices, some of which he found were useful and rigorous. For example, rubrics and anonymized grading are tools which can combat racial bias in grading, which he noted was real and well documented, without lowering standards. 

For this most recent survey, the authors zoomed in on five of the 14 practices “that have stirred the most controversy around the country and that we were hearing about in the media a lot.”

While just over half of teachers worked in a district with at least one of the policies, only 6% reported adoption of four or more and 2% reported adoption of all five, a finding which surprised Tyner.

“I kind of thought we were going to find some districts that were doing all of this stuff, and most districts would be doing none of it,” but instead, “there’s a lot of districts that are just maybe experimenting with one or two.” 

Ken O’Connor, an author and consultant who has spent decades studying grading reform, pointed to this finding as a problem with implementation: These practices are not meant to be used piecemeal but rather as part of a cohesive system, he said.

By picking one or two in this way, “You’re almost dooming it to failure,” he said. It’s essentially like saying, “I want to bake a cake, but I’m only giving you half the ingredients.”

Teachers did, in fact, critique these policies: Just over half (56%) reported that the “no late penalties” policy was harmful, and the majority said basing part of a student’s grade on participation and homework was helpful — in opposition to equitable grading practices. In their open responses, teachers also suggested that they feel pressure to inflate students’ grades, even if there aren’t explicit mandates to do so.

“Counselors can override teachers’ grades if a parent calls because they are concerned that their child’s grades aren’t fairly representing the student’s efforts,” wrote one.

Notably, such a policy is never advocated for in equitable grading theories.

The “unlimited retakes” policy was the most embraced, with 41% of teachers reporting it was helpful and 37% reporting it was harmful.

“I like the idea of students being able to edit/improve their work based on feedback from the teacher,” wrote another teacher. “However, if they do not have deadlines or policies in place to encourage them to try their best the first time, teachers will have to grade almost every assignment more than once.” 

While most educators (58%) said it was important to have clear, schoolwide grading policies, a substantial minority (42%) believe that they should be able to use their own judgement when it comes to grading.

Tyner said moving forward he hopes educators will “take the best from the reforms and from traditional grading, because there’s nothing wrong with trying to make grading more fair and more accurate. It’s only when the implication is that we might be lowering standards and expectations for students that we need to just be really, really careful with what we’re doing.”

For her senior project at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, Katie Collins decided to learn how to play guitar.

She’d originally planned to learn and record four or five songs in eight months, but by early May she told a small crowd, “I chose, in a very Parker fashion, to do two songs, in depth.”

If a school’s ethos can be summed up in a single sentence, that might be it: Less is more. It guides much of what happens in this unusual, if influential, school 30 miles northwest of Boston.

“I went into this having slightly unrealistic expectations of myself,” Collins told judges at her presentation, having predicted this time last year that she’d be “a rock star by May.” 

Asked whether she considers herself a guitar player yet, she was unequivocal: “My idea of being a guitar player is ‘shredding.’ I’m not there yet.” One day, she said, she’ll be a rock star. “I’m gonna keep at it.”

‘We’re not afraid’

Founded in 1994, Parker is a throwback to , when educators rebelled against the impersonal tyranny of bell schedules and the very idea of letter grades. It has found a way to operate without these, laying the groundwork for some of the most influential school experiments happening today.

Parker students aren’t assigned grades. Instead, they constantly revise their work, which teachers judge on a continuum from “beginning” to “meeting” expectations. Work that fails to pass muster doesn’t receive a traditional D or F. Students simply stay in the “beginning” phase of the process, invited to try again without the traditional consequences lower grades carry in most schools.

While operating without traditional letter grades presents a challenge for many new students, this problem soon solves itself, said Brian Harrigan, Parker’s head of school. By the end of the school year, he no longer hears new students talking about grades. “They are definitely motivated by ‘meets.’”

It seems to be working: Parker boasts an enviable college-going rate of 82.4%. And though it doesn’t offer a single Advanced Placement class, Parker’s pass rate on AP exams is among the highest in Massachusetts.

In its latest state report card, Parker’s out-of-school was 0.7%. The number of students disciplined for any reason hovered in single digits.

Most schools keep kids in check by threatening lost points or detention if they’re late, forget an assignment or misbehave, said Deb Merriam, Parker’s academic dean and one of three original staff members. “At this school, there’s no sense that there’s something to lose.”

She added bluntly, “We don’t ‘do fear.’”

There’s also no sense that adults fear kids acting out if they’re unhappy or bored, because so much of the school’s energy is spent ensuring that everyone succeeds in pursuit of their interests.

That principle is central to student life at Parker: Each student owns his or her education. 

“Everyone has chosen to be here,” said Harrigan. “I think that’s important.”

Roots in Sizer’s work

Ironically, fear played a role in the school’s creation three decades ago.

Parker opened its doors in 1995, a year after Massachusetts approved its charter — one of the first in the state. It was led by a group of parents and teachers inspired by educator Theodore R. Sizer — known to colleagues as Ted — who a decade earlier had written the seminal book Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.

The book followed a fictional beleaguered English teacher named Horace Smith, who confronts a system that somehow expects little of students but simultaneously fears their capacity for trouble. The “compromise” of the title describes Horace’s bid to make peace with students by not challenging them too much.

Sizer naturally envisioned a more positive and democratic way to run a high school, with teachers becoming trusted coaches rather than simply getting by. He and his wife, Nancy, founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, which worked to spread the word about his ideas, outlined in 10 “” such as “Student as worker, teacher as coach.”

The Sizers were among the school’s founders and served as co-principals from 1998 to 1999. Ted Sizer died in 2009, and the coalition folded in 2016, but many of today’s most innovative high school models — from California’s heralded to the national network of schools — were founded by his disciples.

‘Is this far enough?’

Individualization is perhaps the key component of what makes Parker work, giving students leeway to build skills and explore interests at their own pace. It also allows teachers to avoid leveling or tracking students, as most schools do.

In an Arts and Humanities class one recent morning, students strummed ukuleles in preparation for the day’s lesson: studying and composing protest songs.

Within a week of picking up the instruments, they’d be expected to perform a protest song, either a cover of a classic, a new version with different lyrics or an original. 

In one of his upper level math classes, teacher Jon Churchill hands students an imaginary $1,000 monthly salary and a handful of bills to pay. Then he tasks them with creating a budgeting spreadsheet. 

The push to individualize sometimes makes Churchill think of himself as a sort of mountain guide, forever asking students, “Is this far enough? Is this far enough? What do you want to do? Do you want to go forward?”

A few kids scramble up the mountain, their energy spent making their spreadsheets as efficient and elegant as possible. Others struggle to create the functions needed just to pay one bill. Individualizing the assignment, he said, means “they can all have that same common language, even though the kids are doing slightly different things.” 

The key to succeeding in such differentiation, Harrigan said, is class sizes of no more than 20 to 25 students and a commitment to team teaching, especially in the early years. 

Teachers assigned to Parker’s youngest students co-teach two long, two-hour sessions daily, assessing the work of no more than about 25 students daily, much smaller than the load of most high school teachers, who must often grade upwards of 100 papers per assignment — one Chicago English teacher recently recalled having to grade as many as per assignment. 

Parker also offers teachers a daily two-hour prep period. That means they can offer “a ton of revision, a ton of reflection” for students to improve their work, Harrigan said. 

The school has inevitably inspired broad interest from two groups: homeschoolers and students with special needs. Students with individualized education plans and less restrictive 504 plans now comprise about 40% of Parker’s student body. 

“We have a lot of parents whose kids have struggled in traditional districts come here for the support that the school offers,” said Sue Massucco, the arts and humanities domain leader. Parker’s ethos allows students to “come and be yourself,” she said. “If they want to wear a cape to school, they wear a cape to school.”

Senior presentations

Just as they’re spared letter grades, they also attend classes in groups that aren’t strictly age-segregated. Instead, they study sequentially in one of three “divisions,” working at their own pace as they master 13 competencies. 

Each division is roughly equivalent to two years, ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Because they “gateway” out of each division, presenting their work to small groups of teachers, parents and classmates, students soon get used to talking to adults, said Marena Cole, a Division 2 arts and humanities teacher. That helps make them more reflective. “They know themselves well,” she said. “They’re asked to reflect on their work constantly, starting from when they’re 12.”

This process culminates in their senior project and a formal, if-friendly, hour-long talk, with 17- and 18-year-olds holding forth on everything they know on topics from hypnosis to van conversion.

Senior Ava Soderman detailed what it’s like to be a ranger at Yellowstone National Park, which she visited last winter. She hopes to work at a national park after she graduates from college — and it shows.

Dressed in a makeshift ranger outfit, Soderman recalled meeting and training with park personnel, persuading one ranger to be her mentor and confronting her doubts about the job. She admitted that she didn’t quite get around to earning her required emergency medical services and paramedic training. “If you guys know me, I don’t do well with needles and blood, and I pass out frequently,” she said. “So this is something that I do plan to get my certification in. It’s just going to require a lot of good mindset and good practice.”

The presentations are smart, often funny and deeply personal.

“By the time they’re seniors, they can hold a room,” said wellness teacher Kafi Beckles. “They can present, they can share their opinions, they’re able to have their own thoughts, not just regurgitate facts.”

Less is more

As a lottery-based charter school, Parker serves students from 40 towns in the Boston area. The “essential” in the school’s name means that, as with others guided by Sizer’s ideals, it strives to do just a few things well. Among the coalition’s 10 principles, one of the most often-quoted is: Less is more: depth over coverage. 

So there’s no band or football team, no high-tech classroom gear, and no pretense that it can do it all.

The less is more sensibility makes a kind of sense at Parker, which for much of its life has been housed in a repurposed, slightly run-down 1960s-era elementary school on a decommissioned Army base. While Harrigan and others often dream about what life might be like in a newer, nicer building, the idea tends to melt away in favor of discussions about curriculum, teacher feedback and student growth.

But it has occasionally hurt Parker in recruiting, as prospective families inevitably compare it to offerings in their communities.

Board chair and parent Pam Gordon, who has had two children attend Parker, recalled sitting in on town meetings in Harvard, Mass., a few years ago as the town council debated building a new $53 million elementary school. Mold had been discovered in the existing school, which offered a “pretty good reason” to start anew.

But when people stood up and said a new building would improve the education there, she said, “I actually laughed.”

She tells people, “Come over to Parker, 10 minutes away, and see what they’re doing, because the education is far superior. And the care that’s given to the students, and the way students treat each other — you don’t need a splashy building.”

“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: . 

Between 2016 and 2021, the average GPA for students taking the test increased from 3.22 to 3.39. But scores on the ACT I — reflecting performance in English, math, reading and science â€” declined slightly, from 20.8 to 20.3. The trend was especially noticeable among Black students and those from low- to moderate-income homes.

The results, based on a sample of over 4 million students in almost 4,800 schools, reflect “persistent, systemic,” grade inflation, wrote the authors, both researchers at ACT. Following a recent from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — or NAEP — the ACT analysis provides further evidence that grades, which often include points for effort and class participation, don’t reflect objective measures of academic achievement.

The study found more grade inflation in higher-poverty schools. Edgar Sanchez, a lead research scientist at ACT, said it’s unclear why that’s the case and called the study “a starting point.”

But Seth Gershenson, an American University researcher who has the issue, attributed the problem to what President George W. Bush “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Schools, Gershenson said, award passing grades “and let someone else deal with the lack of learning later on.”

His research also showed growing grade inflation over time in wealthier schools, where “more entitled parents and students” are putting pressure on teachers to give A’s so students can get into top colleges.

It’s unclear to what extent the relaxation of grading standards during the pandemic affected the study’s outcome, wrote the ACT researchers. California students, for example, were allowed to change their lowest grades. And reduced how much scores on end-of-course tests counted in students’ final grades. The authors noted that students who tested in the middle of a pandemic, especially the spring after schools shut down, “could be different from typical tested students” and also from those who didn’t test until 2021.  

At a time when more colleges and universities are making both the ACT and SAT for admission, ACT CEO Janet Godwin acknowledged the risk that the paper’s argument in support of standardized testing might seem self-serving, 

But she said the company has “a responsibility” to contribute to the conversation.

“We have the means and the data to do this kind of research,” she said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that has published Gershenson’s work, agreed that ACT has “a big dog in that fight.” Regardless, he agreed that current trends in grading are leaving students less prepared for higher education.

“The heart of the problem is that there aren’t any standards or guidelines for grading in most places,” Petrilli said. “Teachers are on their own, and don’t get much, if any, guidance. Nor do they get much training in [education] schools.”

‘In the dark’

Parents rely on grades to give them an accurate portrait of their children’s performance — especially since they are given more frequently than annual state tests, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents become better informed about their children’s progress. 

But many parents might not understand that grades are sometimes more about effort than knowledge, she said. 

“When we ask teachers why they don’t share more with parents about student achievement, they report it is fear-based — fear of not being believed, of being blamed and of their principals not having their back,” she said. “The system is designed to keep parents in the dark about their child’s grade-level performance.”

In recent years, some districts have adopted an approach known as “standards-based grading” that educators say offers a more accurate measure of whether students are meeting expectations. It takes the emphasis off non-academic factors like turning in assignments early and attendance — practices that can vary from teacher to teacher.

The 3,000-student Pewaukee School District in Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee, implemented such a model in 2015. Students are graded on a one-to-four system, with one representing below expectations and four indicating advanced performance. 

“We didn’t want students’ grades dependent on whether they brought in a box of Kleenex,” said Danielle Bosanec, the district’s chief academic officer. “We wanted kids to stop chasing grades and start chasing learning.”

Parents bought into the plan because it allows students more than one chance at a passing grade on an assignment or test so long as they can demonstrate the additional work they did after their first try. The district agreed to convert final scores into letter grades for transcripts.

Bosanec also conducted her own research to test the connection between the new grading model and ACT scores. In general, she found that in a standards-based model, “as students’ grades go up or down, the impact on ACT scores follows suit.”

Despite the studies pointing to grade inflation, there’s no “widespread evidence that institutions have lost trust in GPAs,” said David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. What colleges crave, he said, is more context. 

In the future, he thinks, like research projects or class presentations — used widely in some states like New Hampshire in lieu of tests — could become part of the admissions process.

“There is more to be mined from the student’s high school record than we’re currently getting,” he said. “We’re missing a lot of data about what students can do.”

Signed by Gov. Dan McKee on June 1, creates a Dec. 31 deadline to develop and approve state-specific consumer education and personal finance standards. By the start of the 2022-23 school year, all public high schools in Rhode Island must offer a standards-aligned course.

“It’s very aggressive to get these standards up and running in the time frame that we have set out, but we know that it’s really necessary,” state Education Commissioner AngĂŠlica Infante-Green said. On average, , at $36,193.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

Having met with students statewide who felt they weren’t prepared to go onto college, and given the pandemic’s impact on student engagement, the commissioner told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ this moment was the time to solidify what they had built momentum behind for years.

“[Students] felt like this was something that they were being shortchanged [on]. So we made it a point to push this agenda.”

Rhode Island approved the national Council on Economic Education standards in 2014. On average only about 5 percent of Rhode Island students receive financial literacy education, according to the state education department, given that schools could choose whether or not to adopt the curricula.

Last year, senior Saloni Jain took a personal finance course in a hybrid learning setup, with three days of learning online, at the suburban East Greenwich High School. She said course simulations, like completing mock returns on and creating a budgeting spreadsheet, kept her engaged during virtual learning.

“We were getting paychecks — how do we put that money towards a 401(k) and pay all our bills and pay down our credit card or student loan debt? That was really helpful to visualize, you know, how we might live in the future,” Jain said. “It was just a one-semester course, but it honestly changed the way I think a lot.”

Nationally, have some version of financial literacy standards, which may be incorporated into math or civics classrooms, though be completed before graduation. 

In 2021, strengthening personal finance education. Advocates contend that literacy is key to breaking cycles of poverty, particularly as the younger generation deals with economic fallout from the pandemic. When loans, budgeting and debt management are explicitly explored during the school day, young people are exposed to as they head into adulthood.

A showed that financial literacy graduation requirements result in lower credit card balances and high-interest student loan debt for lower -income students, and decreases in private loans for higher-income students. Working- and lower-class students who took financial literacy courses were also able to work less while enrolled in college, which could encourage college persistence and graduation. Expanding access to personal finance courses and support homeownership down the line.

Even within states considered to have the strongest standards and requirements, students seek more real-world connections to prepare them for the future. Whitman Ochiai, who recently graduated from high school in Alexandria, Virginia, described his mandatory course as “more broad than it was deep”.

Left wondering about retirement decisions, building a balanced budget and the intuition behind large purchases, he started the in 2019 to explore thosetopics. He said there’s been increased interest throughout the pandemic, likely with more students working and families facing economic uncertainty.

“A lot of times the only people who have access to this information are the people who would have had access to it anyway,” Ochiai said. “Especially for first-generation college- goers and students, and parents that may not be homeowners, this is a pathway for them to have a deeper understanding of finance.”

Some Rhode Island teachers created elective courses in their schools in recent years, heeding students’ desires and seeing how financial literacy may enable connections to hard-to-grasp concepts like compounding interest. Before now though, funding and implementation was left to individual teachers or schools to prioritize.

Samantha Desmarais teaches math, financial literacy and computer science at Central Falls High School, which serves predominantly low-income Latino and Black students in a working class city just north of Providence. She hopes the legislation will open the door to financial support from the state for credentialing and hiring, building more capacity to teach the subject.

Otherwise, she said, “there’s going to be disproportionality between the districts that are able to shimmy around their budgets or their staff and make it work, and the districts that are weighted under all of these other things.”

Desmarais teaches about three sections of finance per year; enrollment is always on the higher side even with its elective status, at about 25 to 30 students per class. This fall, she’ll also teach a section for language learners, which introduces students to American money systems and credit.

“If you enjoy learning something today, spread that news and talk about it with your friends. There’s no reason why talking about money has to be this taboo subject,” she tells her students.

Advocates say that personal finance education provides an opportunity for students to break down any stigmas about money conversations before they head into large financial decisions, like student loans, car ownership and credit card debt. Lessons learned may also make their way home and support families facing economic challenges.

“I look at the state’s implementation of this guarantee of a financial education as sort of being a gateway to some meaningful engagement with families,” said Pat Page, vice president with the Rhode Island personal finance coalition and a business educator.

Page, Rhode Island’s former teacher of the year, has been a vocal advocate for broader financial education for years, and was one of the first in the state to teach a standalone course. She supported students, including Sunny Sait, in testifying in favor of broader financial education to the state legislature — in 2014, 2019 and again in 2021.

Though Sait took Page’s class two years ago, he said he still uses the concepts daily. Currently on a gap year after graduating this spring, he’s opened up a Roth IRA, and budgets his internship paycheck to make sure he can still afford things he loves, like karate.

“My mindset definitely shifted a little bit from thinking of money in terms of things, but instead thinking of money as a means for growth, saving and investing. I really had my focus shift from purchasing, like being a consumer, to becoming an investor.”

Many describe the effort to make financial literacy a reality for all Rhode Islanders as both a grassroots and grasstops effort, pushed by students and teachers, but also state leaders, like Treasurer Seth Magaziner, who helped introduce the legislation.

“The strongest advocates who worked very hard to get this bill passed were teachers and students. Students who very much wanted this to be taught, and teachers who are ready to teach it,” said Magaziner, who began his career as an elementary school teacher and his run for governor.

The treasurer and education commissioner both see the law’s signing as phase one of creating a broader financial literacy landscape in the state — their hope is to expand lessons to middle and elementary grades. The education, Magaziner says, will make a particular difference in Rhode Island.

“We do have a large rolling immigrant population, students who are English language learners. We have one of the highest poverty rates in the Northeast. Financial education is not a panacea, it’s not a cure-all, but it is an important part of the puzzle for how we solve these inequities, and correct them.”

Whatever happened to Common Core?

That’s the question that veteran education researcher Tom Loveless asks in the final chapter of , Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. Released this spring by Harvard Education Press, the slim volume examines the debate around the ambitious reform and the inherent limits of trying to improve education systems through regulatory means.

To the regret of its (often very vocal) detractors, nothing much seems to have happened to Common Core; even after a furious political battle in the late Obama years, most states still have some version of the controversial academic standards on the books. States attempting to replace them with new learning frameworks were often engaged in than a substantive overhaul, and once a few years had passed, politicians moved on to new skirmishes in the education culture wars.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

But a decade after they were first adopted by states, little evidence exists to show that teaching or learning was significantly improved by the vast resources poured into implementing the standards. At least one study has found students in states that were early adopters of Common Core scored slightly lower on both the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s reading and math portions. If the point of spending billions of dollars to establish the mammoth set of new learning guidelines was to make sure kids became “college- and career-ready” (to use a term that was ubiquitous around 2013), not much progress seems to have been made toward that goal.

A former sixth-grade teacher, Harvard professor, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Loveless has watched the development of academic standards for decades, ultimately concluding that they are an ineffective tool to improve K-12 education. As he argued to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Kevin Mahnken, regulatory reforms like Common Core are riven with utopian expectations and unlikely to change what actually goes on in classrooms.

“The problem is inherent to top-down efforts at controlling curriculum and instruction,” Loveless writes in the book. “This is not a problem that another set of standards can solve. If standards came out tomorrow, and I agreed with every single word in them, I would still give them only a slim chance of being faithfully implemented — and less than that of moving the needle on student achievement.”

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Kevin Mahnken: Your book focuses deeply on the shortcomings of academic standards. But as a reporter, the impression I’ve developed has been that K-12 education has really been driven over the last few decades by testing and accountability reforms like No Child Left Behind. Do you think people underestimate the importance of standards — not just Common Core, but also the state based standards that preceded it?

Tom Loveless: The accountability movement of the ’90s was all based on standards. There was no state in my memory that went out and created an accountability system where the accountability was based on something other than standards. They all had tests, which were written on a grade-level basis to conform with the standards those states had adopted. So it’s hard to untangle accountability from the question of standards.

In the book, I took a much longer historical perspective. I go back over 100 years to look at standards as a regulatory tool: You’ve got upper-level officials who are trying to influence what schools do with kids in terms of what they teach. That’s been going on forever, and always with limited success. It’s hard for the top of the system to have a large impact on what happens at the bottom of the system.”

That sounds right in terms of the different levers of school reform — tests are based on standards, grad schools prepare future educators to teach to those standards, etc. So they’re at the center of things.

Right, but there’s a nuance there: Those early accountability systems were not about making sure teachers followed the standards; they made sure that teachers and schools produced scores on tests that were aligned to the standards. That’s actually a completely different thing. It was test-based accountability, and there’s a separate literature on that that’s fairly positive. If you hold schools accountable for scoring on a test, and have either rewards or sanctions, you can raise those test scores. There are three or four well-designed studies that show that.

But that’s a whole different issue from what Common Core was about. If you go back and read all the Common Core documents, those standards don’t touch the accountability question at all. And as a matter of fact, the accountability systems post-Common Core — some of the Common Core authors suspect this is why Common Core had little impact — withered away. We have very soft accountability today compared with NCLB, which kind of poisoned the waters for accountability because of the way it was designed.

Do you think the basic proposition of standards-based reform — i.e., that some students just weren’t being held to high standards — was valid? It sounds like you’re saying that rigorous academic expectations aren’t enough on their own to improve K-12 education, but are they a necessary ingredient?

Yes, some states did have standards that were too low. Some districts, some schools, some teachers had standards that were too low. But the question is, can you then force states with low standards to have high standards, and will that have a positive impact? I don’t think you can.

There was a lot of research in the ’90s and the ’00s: Mississippi or some other state had terrible standards, and lots of kids were scoring proficient, but on NAEP, they never even got close [to proficiency]. So obviously the state has much lower standards than what you’d want. But the people in Mississippi read the newspaper; they know their NAEP scores. And where’s the political pressure from the state, from the bottom up, to fix that? Now, in a lot of places, there was that pressure. But if it’s not there, can you come in from some supra-state level and force higher standards onto a state that they implement with fidelity, and eventually believe in? Because if they don’t, you’re probably not going to get very much.

Now take that same argument and just swap out the actors: Can a state come in and do the same thing to a reluctant district? Can a district come in and do it with a reluctant school? See, I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his own building with a teacher who has low standards. So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that’s the thing I’m skeptical of. It’s just never worked, and it didn’t work with Common Core. So the whole approach is flawed.

The most recent evidence I’ve seen about the impact of Common Core on academic achievement comes from Joshua Bleiberg’s study in AERA Open, which found a pretty modest boost to NAEP math scores. Is that typical of the research findings thus far, and do we have reason to think that the reform’s effects could grow with time?

I consider the Bleiberg effect, a positive effect of about .1 standard deviations, to be the upper bound of what the different studies show. The , which I spend more time with in the book, shows a .1 [standard deviation] decrease, which is kind of the lower bound, and all of my own studies fall in between those two boundaries. The probable real effect of Common Core — although I’m not that confident in any of these studies, including my own — is probably somewhere within that range. And that is disappointing, there’s no other way to say it. Especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty. What a distraction to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just miniscule.

There’s one thing in the study that gets at the question: “What if we just stuck with this thing? Maybe there are great things that are going to happen just over the horizon.” If you read Bleiberg’s analysis, most of the effect kicks in after the first two years. It’s not going up; if anything, it’s petering out. The C-SAIL study found that the effect was not only negative, but that it was getting more negative over time. So even though those two studies have different signs in front of the effect — one’s positive, one’s negative — they really kind of find the same thing: The most positive impact was very early in the process of implementing Common Core. To me, that makes total sense because all the professional development, the initial billions of dollars, was all spent in the first few years to get this thing off the ground. I don’t know any study of professional development that says, ‘Oh, wait a decade, and then really good things kick in.’ It just doesn’t work that way.

You mentioned that you’re not totally sure about the findings in these studies, including your own. What are the challenges in measuring effects from reforms like Common Core?

In my work, I don’t even make a causal claim because there are too many impediments to do that.

Both Bleiberg and the C-SAIL study used an interrupted time series design. In order to do that, you need to have a very clear break period: Here’s when this thing didn’t exist, and then on this day, it existed. There are studies that use that design very effectively — for instance, a Josh Angrist study of [the effects of] lowering the age at which people can buy alcohol, which was a big issue in the ’70s. A lot of states lowered their legal drinking age from 21 to 18, and those laws went into effect at midnight on January 1. So suddenly, the bars were filled with 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, whereas before, they couldn’t get in. There was a clear cut-point in the state’s actions that could be measured in terms of pre and post. Academic standards just don’t work that way.

A few different researchers studying Common Core, including myself, ended up going about it in the same way. Virtually all the states in the country adopted Common Core, and you had to sort them: one group that really did Common Core, another group that sort of adopted it and did a half-baked approach, and then the five states that just rejected Common Core. Those were the three groups whose NAEP scores I tried to measure over time. Pretty much all of my analysis showed the same thing, which was very little effect.

Another problem was that the natural comparison group is the five states that rejected Common Core from the beginning: Texas, Virginia, Nebraska, Alaska, and Minnesota in math — they kept their existing math standards but adopted the ELA standards. But each of those states, if you go back and read the standards they did adopt, they’re not terribly different from Common Core. And it’s not as if Common Core was revolutionary; it wasn’t the first set of standards that said, ‘You know, we should teach kids fractions!’ I would argue that Common Core has 80-90 percent overlap with the previous standards that a lot of states had.

So that invites the notion of just what the change was. Of course, the Common Core people would say, ‘It led to better curriculum, better instruction, better tests,’ and again, there’s no evidence of that. Anyway, that’s just a taste of some of the methodological constraints on measuring this.

Is the main problem here that states and districts didn’t implement Common Core well? Or is it just asking too much of academic standards to expect them to really improve teaching and learning? It seems like Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California who also wrote for Harvard, feels that . 

I just did on [American Enterprise Institute scholar] Nat Malkus’s podcast. He started with that question: Is it a problem of implementation, or a problem with the theory of action? Morgan and I both said that the theory itself is flawed. We can’t engineer our way to better standards.

Again, standards are a regulatory tool, and we’re not going to be able to simply regulate better K-12 learning. It’s not going to work that way. Just to give an example — and this isn’t necessarily bad or good implementation, it’s just what happens — when you ask some teachers or district people what the main tenets of Common Core mathematics are, they’ll say, ‘Well, kids need to be working in groups.’ And then they’ll list a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with Common Core, which does not mandate that kids work in groups. It doesn’t even talk about that! It was like NCLB in that if you asked people what it meant, you’d get different answers in different places.

Not long ago, I wrote an article about the press coverage of Common Core and its implementation. Within a couple of years of Common Core’s adoption, you’d have journalists attending these workshops where professional development was being given. And in a particular math workshop, the developer was saying all the stuff I just mentioned: “You need to put your kids in groups, you need to be using manipulatives, you need to deemphasize procedures and rote learning, you need to emphasize conceptual understanding.” Now, Common Core does shoulder some guilt on the conceptual understanding thing, but it doesn’t say you should deemphasize anything.

The point is that, everywhere across the country, we have educators who have belief systems of their own. And if they believe in putting kids in groups, or believe in what we used to call ‘progressive education,’ or student-centered instructional practices, they’re going to interpret any policy coming down the line to promote those things; they’re going to read the documents through that lens. It’s not a heartfelt effort to distort, and these people aren’t sinister. It’s just how they read things. So you’re going to get actual implementation that’s different from what’s on paper, like the old children’s game of telephone where things sound different at the end of the line. That’s not corrupt intent, it’s that you have so many people sifting through these things as they make their way down the system.

It sounds like if you want to really change instruction through academic standards, you’d have to be so prescriptive just to avoid people doing something totally unrelated to what you want. 

And besides that, standards tend to be utopian. They tend to be aspirational, wishful thinking, and Common Core is a clear example of that. Common Core used this phrase, “college- and career-ready,” and then mapped standards back from the twelfth grade. But nobody yet has defined “career-ready” in such a way that doesn’t really just mean “college-ready.” At least, I haven’t seen any good definition of career readiness come out of these standards movements. So you can just delete the word “career,” and essentially what these standards are saying is, “Everybody, 100 percent, will be ready for college by the end of high school.” That’s very much like NCLB’s 100 percent proficiency goal. So what did the test makers, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced, do? They adopted NAEP proficiency as their standard.

The last batch of data I saw from the states that still use Smarter Balanced showed that 32 percent of eleventh-graders pass in math, and 68 percent fall below the threshold indicating readiness. If Common Core were working at all — and if we should have faith in this test to measure a goal that we could actually achieve — we’d be doing better than 32 percent. I mean, are you going to deny a diploma to two-thirds of the kids because they fail math? Politically, it’s a non-starter.

A lot of the reformers point to high-achieving countries like Singapore and South Korea, but if you map international assessments like TIMSS and PISA onto NAEP proficiency, it shows that at least 25 percent of their populations would fail. And these are the highest-achieving countries on the planet. So the goals are ones that no society has ever attained, and it’s not going to happen.

You’ve also written previously about the fact that NAEP proficiency levels might just be set too high. The NCES commissioner basically said as much in of the National Assessments Governing Board.

It turns our national test, which should be something that gives real information, into a kind of disinformation. It makes it like one of those late-night cable ads: “You can look like this if you just buy cans of this stuff and drink it five times a day!” It doesn’t work, it winds up undermining the validity, and I think Common Core suffers from it all. If you look at the outcomes by the end of high school, they’re much more than ambitious; they’re unrealistic.

David Black once saw a UFO.

At least that’s how he gets his students’ attention before revealing that it was only a sundog — a bright light caused when the sun’s rays refract through ice crystals in the atmosphere.

Researching more famous accounts of UFO sightings and purported alien abductions with students is how he’ll be spending the summer. And with the federal government’s report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” — or UAPs — expected as soon as this week, they’ll have new grainy videos to analyze and debate.

“If you have a current event that comes along, as a teacher you want to weave that in,” said Black, who at New Haven School, a private boarding school for girls in Saratoga Springs, Utah.

When former President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion funding bill in December, educators were eye-balling the $54 billion in relief funds included for school reopening. But tucked into the more than 5,500 pages of legislative text was a Sen. Marco Rubio-sponsored directing Naval intelligence to uncover what they’ve been tracking in the skies. The bill asked for detailed reports of UAPs and knowledge of whether “a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities” that might harm Earth, or at least the U.S. The report, combined with Navy pilots’ of aircraft displaying unusual movements, provide fresh material for teachers who find that questions about alien visitors are a great way to engage students in science.

Highly trained admit they are taking the sightings of these unusual aircraft seriously — and think others should, too. With both interested in the report’s findings and respected news shows like “60 Minutes” following the topic, the possibility that otherworldly beings are patrolling our atmosphere is no longer just the stuff of sci-fi movies and paranormal conventions.

The upcoming release of the report is perfectly timed for the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence unit Black teaches each summer. He hooks students with tales of close encounters and uses hands-on projects and 3-D models to explore the math and physics involved in aliens traveling for tens of thousands of years to reach Earth.

His students learn the , a formula for the probability of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They read news reports of alleged sightings — like that of , a lumberjack whose 1975 account of being abducted by aliens was featured in the 1993 film “Fire in the Sky.” Then they present the skeptics’ side, offer their own opinions and lead their classmates in a discussion.

‘Studying these things for decades’

UFO conspiracy theories teach students to have an open mind, “but also to have a skeptical filter,” said Jeff Adkins, an at Deer Valley High School in Antioch, California, near Oakland.

He has students consider the sheer size of the universe when deciding whether alien life forms would bother conducting experiments on humans or jamming the military’s radar systems.

“I still have a childhood fascination with aliens, but now I know that there must be … solid evidence to support aliens before I truly believe they are real,” said Dennis Gavrilenko, a senior in Adkins’s astronomy and space exploration course this year. “I find it unlikely that aliens traveled thousands of lightyears to get to Earth just to fly around super fast and not make themselves known.”

But physics professor Kevin Knuth, at the University of Albany in New York, thinks there is something — or someone — observing us from above. He’s among the UFO researchers who have shared their expertise with high school students.

His suspicions that UFOs are more than a hoax began while he was in graduate school at Montana State University. In 1988, two cows from a nearby herd were mutilated with surgical precision, and a professor mentioned UFOs often interfered with nuclear missile systems at Malmstrom Air Force Base three hours away.

Years later, UFO researcher held a press conference with Air Force officers talking about the same occurrences at Malmstrom. That’s when Knuth became convinced, and he thinks the report to Congress will tell only part of the story.

“We now know that the government has been studying these things for decades and not telling anybody about it,” Knuth said.

A paper Knuth co-authored in 2019 focuses on of “unidentified aerial vehicles” that display “technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft.”

Knuth’s calculations of speed and acceleration are also good high school physics problems, said Berkil Alexander, who teaches at Kennesaw Mountain High School, outside Atlanta. His fascination with UFOs began when he saw “Flight of the Navigator,” a 1986 film about an alien abduction, and in 2019, he was chosen to participate in focusing on increasing student engagement in STEM.

In the final days of each school year, he holds an “E.T. exoplanet symposium” in which teams of students, taking on the roles of astronomer, astrobiologist, historian and a Pentagon investigator, compete against each other to make a case using the evidence they’ve collected.

Alexander thinks the truth has been concealed for decades because it might provoke panic. But now he thinks, “people are pretty well prepared to handle whatever it is.”

‘Don’t take a side’

Teachers who touch on UFOs might find a place for the topic when they introduce students to the solar system in elementary school — think colorful Styrofoam balls dangling from wire hangers. Space science gets even more attention in middle school.

At Coles Elementary in Virginia’s Prince William County Schools, aliens turned up in an afterschool “cryptozoology club” in which students studied crop circles and interviewed a UFO researcher from — the site of the alleged UFO crash in 1947.

How to report a UFO sighting and whether there are baby aliens are among the questions students asked the experts, said Tara Hamner, one of three teachers who started the program four years ago. Like the other cryptids they study, including Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, she believes the club is one of a kind and is a fun way for students to learn how to collect evidence, evaluate online sources and interact with scientists.

The group didn’t meet this year because of the pandemic, but Hamner said she’s sure the government’s report will spark additional questions from students in the fall. “We love it when we have current news to use our inquiry-based learning to investigate,” she said.

In high school, standalone astronomy classes aren’t common and are typically offered as . Those teaching the subject might have a personal interest, but didn’t study it in college — like Alec Johnson, who asked for a day off work in 2017 to watch the solar eclipse but ended up turning the expedition into a school trip with 150 students and 20 adults.

Afterwards, his students at Morgan County High School in central Georgia pushed for a separate astronomy class. The possibility of alien life is the topic they get the most passionate about, perhaps because of the stereotype that are more common in rural areas like theirs.

“The kids get into it, especially if you don’t take a side,” Johnson said, adding that he’s looking forward to the government’s report including previously unreleased footage and photos to share with his students. “It makes the History Channel and the teachers happy.”

Bennett Evans, a senior who took Johnson’s astronomy class this year, said his teacher’s enthusiasm for the subject rubs off on students.

“His class made me more conscious of science in general,” said Evans, recalling an image Johnson uses to get students thinking about whether aliens exist. “If you take a glass of water from the ocean, we know there are whales in the ocean, but we can’t tell from that glass. That’s like our universe.”

Georgia science standards require students to study whether there are other “habitable” zones and planets besides Earth. But Johnson goes all out, enhancing his lessons with “The X-Files” theme music and classroom decor.

“Any self-respecting astronomy teacher has to have a Fox Mulder poster on the wall,” he said.