In this one-hour webinar, hosted by AERA and 蜜桃影视, leading education researchers will explore how AI is being used in assessment today, what evidence we have about its effectiveness and what risks demand careful attention. The conversation will balance promise with caution, highlighting both cutting-edge research and the policy and ethical considerations shaping the future of student assessment.

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But that short-term focus on the averages loses sight of what鈥檚 happening at the tails 鈥� the top performers and the weakest 鈥� and how things have evolved over longer periods of time. 

To zoom out, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, 蜜桃影视鈥檚 art and technology director, to build the time-lapse tools below. 

The first one shows you the evolution of 12th grade math scores. This particular test was first administered in 2005 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the 2024 scores came out in September, 蜜桃影视 wrote about the declines overall and for the lowest-performing students.

The reading scores for 12^th graders are even more depressing. They haven鈥檛 gotten as much attention as the math scores, perhaps because the averages scores haven鈥檛 followed as dramatic of an up-and-down rollercoaster as the math scores have followed.

These graphs show the scores of 12^th graders in math and reading, but it鈥檚 likely that other grades and subjects would show similar patterns. It鈥檚 not just that average scores have declined across a wide range of tests, grades and subjects; we also have a lot more low-performing students than we did in the past. 

While the data presented here are at the national level, any state, district or school leader could see how things are changing in their community. At the classroom or school level, increased variability in student performance makes it harder for teachers to personalize their instruction and for school leaders to design systemwide supports. To get things back on track, policymakers should pay special attention to how their lowest-performing students are faring.

But considerably less attention has been paid to the decentralized, bottom-up efforts by well-intentioned policymakers and practitioners at all levels that accomplish the same thing 鈥� gutting our collective knowledge of how well kids are doing in school. These efforts, which include abolishing testing, undermining accountability, watering down grades and struggling to respond rapidly to artificial intelligence, are making it impossible to understand who鈥檚 doing well and who needs support to get back on track. In the long run, it will be harder to run effective education organizations, and children will be worse off for it. 

The latest piece of evidence for this crisis is a from UC San Diego that shows shocking increases in the proportion of students arriving unable to perform anything approaching college mathematics. These are students who have excelled in the K-12 system 鈥� getting the As and Bs in allegedly rigorous courses that are necessary to be admitted to a highly selective university. But placement tests upon arrival at UCSD show the incoming students are far behind, forcing them into remedial courses and making it harder for them to complete their degrees. 

While the report has garnered and shocked many, its results weren鈥檛 surprising to those of us who have followed the trends over the last decade. From the bottom up, in individual schools and districts, universities and state departments of education, every signal of student readiness has been relentlessly hollowed out.

The clearest cause of this trend is the gutting of testing and accountability. In the wake of COVID, universities made standardized tests or banned them altogether. The University of California system these data from applications. As a result, college admissions officers lack important data that convey key information about student readiness, data that are especially valuable at . At the same time, K-12 testing and accountability have been substantially undermined since the passage of the , and many experts (including me) believe this is at least partially to blame for a . 

Without standardized tests, colleges must rely primarily on grades to gauge student readiness. But these cannot provide the same level of information that tests can. It was that grades and course titles were imprecise measures of what children had learned. But the information gleaned from classroom performance has been weakening as runs rampant. Perhaps well intentioned, policies like or requiring teachers to give at least a for any completed assignment have contributed to upward pressure on grades. But more generally, there is the cultural pressure to be kind and lenient to students by offering them unlimited makeups and refusing to hold the line on high expectations. Many factors contribute, but the result is that grades provide less and less useful information, which is a disaster with so few other data points to use. 

Even other elements of the education system that might be useful for understanding student performance are increasingly losing their ability to signal college readiness. Think of admissions essays and the ways they are easily corrupted by artificial intelligence. As a college instructor, my ability to gauge students鈥� writing and reasoning abilities is much weaker now than it was even a couple years ago, and this trend may well accelerate. Students increasingly use AI to write college application essays that are then in part by AI 鈥� an almost laughable situation, if it weren鈥檛 so grim. 

There is potential in this moment, however, to recognize the value of standardized assessments that cannot be undermined by artificial intelligence. Universities should again require prospective students to take a validated standardized test, but in a way that maximizes their benefits and minimizes potential harms. This means states should do things like that all students take college admission tests like the SAT or ACT (and if they are state-mandated, they should also be paid for by the state), while also leveraging free test preparation materials so students can feel ready. Even better would be for states to make sure tests are connected to what students are taught, perhaps building standards-aligned high school assessments that public universities would accept as evidence of readiness. Think of Advanced Placement exams or state end-of-course tests that are standards-aligned. These kinds of policies would make the tests fairer while still providing student-readiness data of high enough quality that universities can make good decisions using them. 

Grades also need to mean something again. This involves rolling back reforms that lower expectations for students. And in the context of AI, it also entails helping teachers figure out how to assess student learning in ways that are trustworthy and valid. Without these kinds of fundamental changes, neither classroom teachers nor universities will be able to make the kinds of decisions that will help ensure student success.

Failure to act in this moment will harm both students and institutions 鈥� and ultimately, all of us. 

SPRINGFIELD 鈥� The first school report card issued under Illinois鈥� new, revised scoring system shows higher student proficiency rates in English language arts and math, but continuing disparities between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups.

The 2025 report card shows more than half of all students (52.4%) scored proficient or better on English language arts exams, but only 38% met grade-level proficiency standards for math.

Those numbers are based on standardized tests that students from third grade through high school took in the spring 2025 semester. They reflect a the Illinois State Board of Education approved in August that established new benchmarks for proficiency.

鈥淚llinois’ previous benchmarks for English language arts proficiency were the most restrictive in the country, resulting in the mislabeling of high achieving college ready students as being not proficient,鈥� State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said during a media briefing on the report card.

鈥淭his meant that the students who were succeeding in school passing advanced placement and dual credit courses, taking leadership roles within their schools, enrolling in college and still being labeled as not proficient on our state assessment.鈥�

The change in scoring systems was expected to result in more students being classified as proficient in reading and math, but fewer in science. And that is what happened.

In 2024, only 39% of students who were tested scored proficient or better in English language arts and only 28% did so in math. On the science assessment, which is given to fifth and eighth grade students, the proficiency rate dropped from 53.1% in 2024 to 44.6% in 2025.

But Sanders said the 2025 scores cannot really be compared with previous years because the year-over-year changes are mostly the result of the new scoring system, not a change in how well students performed. However, he also said there were other indications that student performance did improve in 2025.

鈥淭hey would have increased if we had kept the same cut scores,鈥� he said. 鈥淗owever, we changed the cut scores, so we can’t tell you what they would have been. But we know they would have improved.鈥�

Performance gaps

All states have issued annual report cards since the 2002-2003 school year when they were mandated by the federal law known as the . They were intended as a tool to hold districts and individual schools accountable for bringing all students up to a level of proficiency in reading and math, and for improving their high school graduation rates.

That also meant closing the persistent achievement gaps between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups of students.

But the law also gave states flexibility to establish their own standards for proficiency and to develop their own tests to measure student performance.

In Illinois, most students in grades 3-8 take the for English language arts and Math. Students in fifth and eighth grade also take the Illinois Science Assessment.

At the , ninth and 10th grade students take the PreACT Secure exam. High school juniors and some high school seniors take the ACT with Writing, which includes tests in English, math, reading, science and writing.

In Illinois, the 2025 report card shows there are still wide gaps in proficiency rates between white, Black and Hispanic students in both English language arts and math.

Among fourth graders, for example, 55.4% of white students scored proficient or better in math, compared to 28.8% of Hispanic students and 17.4% of Black students.

Among eighth graders, two-thirds of white students (66.6%) scored proficient compared to just over one-third (36.7%) for Black students and 45.4% for Hispanic students.

The 2025 report card also includes data for the first time for a newly categorized ethnic group 鈥� 鈥淢iddle Eastern or North African,鈥� abbreviated MENA in the data files.

Among MENA students, the 2025 report card showed a 53.9% proficiency rate in fourth-grade English language arts and a 42.3% proficiency rate for eighth-grade math.

Graduation rates

One area where Illinois has made progress in closing achievement gaps is high school graduation rates.

In 2025, the statewide four-year graduation rate reached a 15-year high of 89%. That was up 3.4 percentage points from a decade earlier. But the rate was also up across all demographic groups, and the gap between those groups narrowed significantly.

In 2015, the four-year graduation rate among white students was 90.2%. That was 14.7 points higher than the Black graduation rate, and 9.5 points higher than the rate for Hispanic students.

In 2025, the graduation rate for white students inched up to 92.4%, but it also rose among other groups. As a result, the gap between white and Black students narrowed to just 9.5 percentage points, and the gap between white students and Hispanic students narrowed to just 6 points.

Sanders gave credit for much of that improvement to the Evidence-Based Funding formula, which lawmakers passed in 2017. That law called for adding at least $300 million per year in new funding each year to the state鈥檚 K-12 education budget.

Since then, Sanders said, Illinois has added more than $3 billion in EBF funding to the budget, with the bulk of that money targeted toward the least-funded school and earmarked for things specifically designed to improve student outcomes.

鈥淒istricts have used these resources to expand interventions like summer school,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey’ve added mentoring, credit recovery courses, transition programs for English and math, and they broadened access to career and technical education, advanced placement, international baccalaureate and dual credit. These opportunities keep students engaged and on track for success.鈥�

Other findings

The report card also contains data on several other measures of the state鈥檚 education system.

The number of full-time equivalent teachers working in Illinois reached a new high of 137,899, an increase of 687 from the previous year. The teaching workforce also became slightly more racially diverse, with 21.1% of them classified as nonwhite, compared to 20.4% last year. But total student enrollment decreased slightly to just under 1.85 million.

Chronic absenteeism declined for the third consecutive year in 2025 but still remained high at 25.4%. Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the days in a school year, regardless of whether the absence is excused or not. The rate shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a peak of 29.8% in 2022.

is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn鈥檛 some wonky technical issue; annual assessments provide important information that helps parents make educational decisions for their children, teachers to adjust classroom practices and policymakers to craft laws and allocate resources. Strong accountability measures force adults to take a hard look at how schools are serving the most vulnerable students and take action. Targeted funding provides additional opportunities for students from backgrounds long marginalized by America’s education system. 

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

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

A painter prepped the side of a classroom building at the school for a new mural 鈥� smiling dragons in caps and gowns, and the district slogan: 鈥淩eady for the World.鈥� On a patch of pavement sat a mini outdoor library featuring a small seating area, an umbrella for shade and a cart full of books.

She hopes the features prompt visitors to ask, 鈥淲ho鈥檚 the principal here?鈥� But the progress at 135th, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, goes much deeper. Chronic absenteeism is down to 13%, from 17% in 2024. Over the past two years, the percentage of students meeting state standards in English language arts has climbed from 25% to 37%. In math, it grew from 26% to 34%.

The changes, along with the formation of a STEM lab and the addition of afterschool Boys and Girls Clubs, were enough to convince Daveyeon Shallowhorn, the school鈥檚 plant manager, to pull his two kids out of a nearby Catholic school and enroll them in 135th.

鈥淚 just see different things being offered that I don’t usually see,鈥� he said.  

Districtwide, leaders are celebrating the highest-ever performance on California鈥檚 state test. But the strong gains in math, reading and science, at every grade level, weren鈥檛 limited to wealthier, or high-performing magnets. They were evenly distributed across some of the district鈥檚 most challenging, high-poverty schools, like 135th.

Some say Superintendent Alberto Carvalho鈥檚 centralized approach to steering the nation鈥檚 second-largest district is lifting performance at schools that languished near the bottom for years. The seven-member school board, which hired him in 2021, reaffirmed their confidence in his leadership last month, to renew his contract for another four years. But others say there are likely multiple explanations for the boost. The question is whether the positive trends will continue in a city where the powerful has a history of resisting top-down programs.

鈥淚f Carvalho is seeing gains, that means our students are gaining,鈥� said Jose Luis Navarro, a former principal in the district who now coaches school leaders. For now, United Teachers Los Angeles is unhappy that a recently adopted budget didn鈥檛 include raises. Nevertheless, Navarro urged the union to embrace Carvalho鈥檚 agenda. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e already tried fighting every superintendent for the last 40 years. Just try working with one and see what happens.鈥�

The improvements came in spite of wildfires that wiped out part of the city, a crackdown on undocumented students and a federal government trying to on blue California. 

鈥淥ur kids, our students persevered,鈥� Carvalho, who declined to be interviewed, said at his back-to-school address in late July. 鈥淭hey, in fact, soared.鈥�

But while students from all racial groups improved, significant gaps remain. At least two-thirds of white and 74% of Asian third-graders met or exceeded expectations in reading, compared to 37% of Latino students and 31% of Black students. 

鈥淲e will redouble our efforts. We will redouble our commitment,鈥� he pledged at an Oct. 10 press conference at Maywood Elementary. 

鈥楽maller numbers鈥�

Experts say the recent achievement growth among the district鈥檚 neediest students is likely a cumulative effect of several initiatives, including a more uniform approach to instruction, extra help for kids who are the furthest behind and a concentrated focus on the most troubled schools. 

But Carvalho has 鈥済enerally good instincts about what works,鈥� said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California. The district adopted a research-based literacy curriculum, has over 10,000 teachers in the science of reading and has spread some of those to math instruction. 鈥淚t seems the district is investing in quality curriculum and supporting teachers to use it.鈥�

As scores go up, however, enrollment continues to dwindle. Over the past five years. LAUSD has lost .

But that factor could be working in the district鈥檚 favor. That鈥檚 because for now, LAUSD, unlike , has , leaving some schools with more staff per student.

鈥淵ou already have built-in small group instruction with smaller numbers,鈥� said Nery Paiz, principal of Glen Alta Elementary School, east of downtown. With an enrollment of about 100, his average class size is about 19 students, he said. 

shows that such 鈥減ronounced鈥� declines can sometimes lead to increases in test scores. found that enrollment loss doesn鈥檛 immediately translate into funding cuts, freeing up more resources for schools in the short term. LAUSD鈥檚 $18.8 billion budget, adopted in June, increases spending for majority-Black schools, arts programs and support for LGBTQ students.

鈥楴o secret sauce鈥�

Some in the district say the uptick in scores would have happened without Carvalho, whom they dismiss as a slick media personality.

鈥淲e’re far enough away from the lockdowns that teachers have been able to recover, and students have been able to recover,鈥� said Nicolle Fefferman, a veteran high school social studies teacher in the district. 鈥淭here is no secret sauce to teaching.鈥�

She helps lead an advocacy group, Parents Supporting Teachers, whose members are far less enamored with Carvalho than when he arrived in early 2022. The district鈥檚 failed experiment with a $6 million AI chatbot has drawn accusations of misspending. Officials discontinued use of the tool when the company went under. Others argue he to close schools during the fires, relying on guidelines that failed to account for multiple fires burning across the region and filling the air with . 

Some parents say students have in school and are unhappy with Carvalho鈥檚 move to roll out an online program called . To Fefferman, the digital lessons and assessments represent 鈥渙vertesting,鈥� which the teachers union has traditionally opposed. UTLA didn鈥檛 respond to requests for comment, but Maria Nichols, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the principals union, said i-Ready has created 鈥渇riction鈥� between school leaders and teachers who object to the program.

The increase in scores is worth celebrating, she said, but said it came 鈥渙n the backs of the [principals] who are working 60 hour weeks.鈥� Her union joined with UTLA and SEIU Local 99, which represents non-teaching employees, outside schools Sept. 16. All three are currently in negotiations with the district over salaries and working conditions. 

Board President Scott Schmerelson, who has the union鈥檚 support, said such concerns are to be expected. It鈥檚 a 鈥済eneral rule鈥� to complain about the superintendent 鈥渘o matter what he says, no matter what he does,鈥� he said. But he called the 鈥済rumbling鈥� minimal. 

He鈥檚 particularly enthusiastic about the district鈥檚 Black Student Achievement Plan, a $175 million initiative that provides schools serving Black students additional counselors, cultural activities and field trips. Former Superintendent Austin Beutner proposed the program in early 2021 to reduce achievement gaps. Under Carvalho, it continues to expand, in spite of challenges from who say it discriminates against students of other races. 

Since last year, students in Black Student Achievement Plan schools have seen slightly more growth in reading and math than the district as a whole. 

The additional resources have 鈥渉elped [Black students] a lot, not only academically but emotionally,鈥� Schmerelson said. 鈥淚 think they feel important. I think they feel respected.鈥�

鈥楴othing short of remarkable鈥�

With high expectations, the board voted unanimously to hire Carvalho in late 2021. At the time, Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, likened the award-winning superintendent鈥檚 arrival to鈥淟eBron coming to the Lakers.鈥� The board trusted that Carvalho鈥檚 success leading the Miami-Dade schools for 14 years would follow him to the West Coast. 

But efforts to overcome COVID learning loss and rise above pre-pandemic performance began a year earlier, with schools still locked down. Most students wouldn鈥檛 set foot in classrooms for another year. 

Beutner used COVID relief funds to launch Primary Promise, a highly popular effort to target extra instruction to struggling readers, including English learners, students in foster care and others most likely to fall further behind because of school closures. 

In 2021, a Boston-based consulting group that designed the model 鈥渘othing short of remarkable.鈥� On average, students began the year reading five words correctly per minute. Some couldn鈥檛 read at all. After 10 weeks, they were close to reaching the goal of 21 words per minute.

Julie Navarro, who is married to Jose, worked on the program as a reading specialist at Panorama City Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, where she said teachers were eager to share materials and ideas with each other. 

鈥淚t was seriously the most positive collaboration I’ve ever been a part of,鈥� she said. Primary Promise teachers attended monthly training that she described as 鈥渨ell-planned, thorough and research-based.鈥� 

Then Carvalho , arguing that with relief funds drying up, it was unsustainable to keep paying instructional aides to staff the program. The renamed Literacy and Numeracy Intervention expanded services into higher grades, drawing criticism from who said the emphasis on the early grades was what made it effective. Beutner and Ray Cortines, also a former superintendent in the district, called the move .

鈥淚 had never seen teachers who were willing to die on the hill of an LAUSD program,鈥� Fefferman said. 鈥淎s a high school teacher, I was like 鈥榊es, please make sure they can read by third grade.鈥� 鈥� 

In Julie Navarro鈥檚 view, educators who lead the intervention work are sometimes 鈥減ulled in multiple directions鈥� and the program has 鈥渓ess integrity鈥� than the original. But Panorama, she said, is an example of staying true to the model of giving students small group instruction and consistently tracking their progress.

The school has seen double digit increases in reading and math since 2022 and was on this year鈥檚 list of . With many families facing financial hardship and newcomers navigating language and cultural barriers, Julie described the population as 鈥渢he most-challenged families I鈥檝e ever seen all at one school. In spite of their situation, they were growing.鈥�

鈥楰ids know their data鈥�

Close attention to student data was a hallmark of the Primary Promise program. Carvalho expects the same level of monitoring districtwide with i-Ready. The platform, Schmerelson said, helps teachers know whether to 鈥渟low down鈥� the pace of learning for students who are struggling or move kids ahead.  

On a bulletin board in a second grade classroom at 135th Elementary, students鈥� initials are clustered into four color-coded groups 鈥� from blue for exceeding standards in i-Ready down to red for being two grade levels behind. Some argue that 鈥渄ata walls鈥� if they鈥檙e not among the high-achievers. But Tanya Ortiz-Franklin, the school board member whose district includes the school, believes the practice motivates students to work hard. 

鈥淜ids know their data and teachers know their data,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hey are using it to move instruction. That鈥檚 exactly what we’ve been trying to do for years.鈥� 

Her region encompasses 175 schools that stretch from the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro 鈥� the busiest container terminal in the U.S. 鈥� to the historic Black neighborhoods south of downtown. They include Maya Angelou Community High School, one of Carvalho鈥檚 121 鈥減riority schools,鈥� where he takes a more hands-on approach to tracking data and staffing schools with extra counselors and academic coaches. 

鈥淚 spend 90% of my time dealing with 10% of the schools,鈥� Carvalho said at a conference at  Harvard University in September. 鈥淭hey are accountable directly to me.鈥� 

The schools have some of the poorest achievement and attendance rates in the district, and in Maya Angelou鈥檚 case, a high rate of community violence. In 2019, the listed the high school among those with at least 50 homicides within a one-mile radius over a five-year period. In 2023, a stray bullet during a football game at the school.

鈥淏eing an inner-city school, it’s very easy to focus on the negative aspects that happen here. That’s the low hanging fruit,鈥� said Principal Jose Meza. That鈥檚 why he encourages staff and students to 鈥渇lood鈥� social media platforms with positive news, like a poetry night for newcomers, and the 13 students admitted to Berkeley and the University of California Los Angeles this year.

鈥淓mbracing our roots and honoring our heritage,鈥� the school posted on Instagram for Hispanic Heritage Month, with a reel of students dancing, sampling food and displaying artwork.

But in trying to make students feel welcome and safe inside the fence that surrounds the school, Meza has also tightened up the academic program. He reassigned counselors to students by grade level, rather than grouping them alphabetically. The change allows ninth graders to get extra support as they adjust to the demands of high school.

He gives students a double dose of Algebra I each day if they need it, and moved credit recovery courses to the regular school day instead of afterschool or on Saturdays when they鈥檙e less likely to come. His students have posted gains in state scores the past two years, but two-thirds of 11th graders still don鈥檛 meet expectations in language arts and over 80% are failing math.

鈥淗alf of our students are coming in below grade level,鈥� he said 鈥淭hat doesn’t mean we’re going to treat them as such. We’re going to have expectations that are aligned to the standards.鈥�

Carvalho aims to create more consistency in teaching across the district, but he鈥檚 choosing math and reading programs based on the experience of schools that tested programs and found them to be effective with high-need students, said Rick Miller, CEO of CORE Districts, a network of nine large systems in the state, including LAUSD.

Illustrative Math, now being phased in districtwide, is one example. Teachers at Jordan High School, in a densely populated neighborhood of housing projects and small homes, were among the first to use the program. 

On a Monday morning earlier this month, 10th graders in Luis Lopez鈥檚 geometry class opened their workbooks to a new lesson on congruent shapes. They chatted with classmates about the set of rectangles on the page before Lopez stepped in to remind them of vocabulary words like 鈥渧ertices鈥� and 鈥渃orresponding.鈥� The curriculum is structured so that students grapple with new concepts and work together on problems before teachers deliver a full lesson. 

鈥淲hen we were going to school, especially in math, it was 鈥業 will model. I’m the teacher and now 鈥� you’ll just do 100 problems,鈥� 鈥� said Principal Alex Kim. This curriculum, he said, flips that process while also ensuring the tasks focus on grade-level material.

The program has gained popularity in other districts. The New York City Public Schools saw a decline in scores after implementing the curriculum in hundreds of schools. But two , one in Missouri and one in Maryland, found that students using Illustrative Math outperformed those who didn鈥檛. At Jordan, a quarter of 11th graders met expectations in math, compared to less than 4% two years ago.

鈥楬istoric generational implications鈥�

To some former LAUSD parents, the improvements are too little, too late.

They are cynical about any post-pandemic rebound, saying that the district contributed to learning loss by staying closed almost until the end of the 2020鈥�21 school year. 

鈥淚 don’t think LAUSD should get credit for putting out a fire that it was responsible for lighting,鈥� said Ben Austin, a longtime Democratic political adviser and former member of the state school board. 鈥淢y daughters didn’t go to school for 18 months, along with all the other kids in LAUSD. That obviously had historic generational implications.鈥�

California鈥檚 sluggish reopening affected students statewide, but what angered some LAUSD parents the most was the teachers union鈥檚 influence over remote instructional time during school closures. In March 2021, 蜜桃影视 reported that the union negotiated a reduced, six-hour school day despite district officials saying they didn鈥檛 want to 鈥渟hortchange the students.鈥� The revelation came during a lawsuit, against the district and the union.

The agreement promises 45 hours per year of high-dosage tutoring to 100,000 students who are the furthest behind as well as summer school for up to 250,000 students in the district who were affected by the extended closures.

During the 2020-21 school year, Judith Larson said her daughter鈥檚 remote classes often 鈥渆nded well before they were supposed to鈥� or that teachers used the sessions to collect homework assignments rather than provide live instruction. Her daughter lost so much ground in math that last year, as a junior in high school, she scored at a sixth grade level. In English, she was two years behind and losing hope that she would be able to attend the University of California Los Angeles, her dream school. Now a senior, she鈥檚 made progress, but still struggles in math. 

鈥淪he is working hard to bridge the gap,鈥� her mother said. 鈥淚 am hoping that the high-dose tutoring 鈥� will help her get there.鈥�

As with schools nationwide, the pandemic worsened longstanding achievement gaps in LAUSD. There鈥檚 still a 30 percentage point difference between poor students and those from wealthier families in reading and math. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 a long way to go,鈥� and 鈥渨ith each year, progress gets harder,鈥� Miller said. But as a former state education official, he never expected LAUSD to outperform the state. 鈥淭hey were too big.鈥�

This year, LAUSD鈥檚 growth exceeded the state鈥檚 and California鈥檚 other large school districts. During the press event at Maywood Elementary, state Superintendent Tony Thurmond was on hand to mark the achievement. He organized a webinar so other districts in the state could 鈥渉ear some of the stories about what has created that success.鈥�

Speaker after speaker stepped to the podium to share in what one board member called a 鈥渨atershed moment鈥� for LAUSD. Drawing a few chuckles, Carvalho paused to note that Thurmond had to slip out early and 鈥済ive some love to other lower-performing districts.鈥� 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite their critiques, school leaders aren鈥檛 calling for accountability to disappear. On the contrary, only 10% of Canopy leaders favored eliminating accountability altogether. But even fewer support maintaining the status quo. They voiced strong support for systems that uphold equity and transparency while evolving in three key ways:

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

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

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

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

One of the major themes of my writing is that mass media is driven by , which is driven by , and this is .

So I genuinely hate to be the bearer of bad news or to complain that some negative information is receiving insufficient attention, but on September 9, we got the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 12th graders, and they were the .

That鈥檚 not good. At this point, I think we all understand that the pandemic badly disrupted schooling and that while this was worst in the places with prolonged school closures, it impacted all kinds of kids in all kinds of places.

But we would ideally be seeing at the national level  that we鈥檝e seen in Washington, D.C., which is that test scores fell dramatically after Covid but are bouncing back. Indeed, by one measure D.C.鈥檚 English language arts scores are the . But even using other measures or , where the results are much worse, D.C.鈥檚 public schools are at least making headway in recovering from the pandemic. Of course, D.C. had a positive trend in test scores before the pandemic. By contrast, if you look at the national picture, scores were declining between 2015 and 2019 as well, so it鈥檚 perhaps not a huge surprise that the decline has simply continued.

No demographic subgroups registered a statistically significant increase. And, as shown in the chart just below, the fall existed  鈥� the kids in the lowest percentiles experienced the biggest drop, but even the kids in the top percentiles are doing a little worse than they were 10 years ago.

This situation seems pretty bleak to me. Here is how the NAEP Basic competency level for 12th graders is  in terms of reading informational texts:

When reading informational text such as exposition and argumentation, 12th-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level can likely

• use context, typically within close proximity, to identify the meaning of unknown words and phrases
  
• identify and make judgements about key details within and across texts
  
• use those details to draw simple inferences about author鈥檚 purpose, tone, and word choice
  
• provide opinions and sometimes support them with generalized text evidence
  
• evaluate the effectiveness of an author鈥檚 claim, organization, and evidence used
  
• utilize text features and organizational structure to locate information and identify textually explicit details

In other words, about a third of high school seniors basically can鈥檛 read prose text at all. They can (I hope) read signs and labels in stores and iMessage each other, but they cannot read a passage of text and understand what it鈥檚 saying.

This is really bad! And while there鈥檚 been a decent amount written about these latest test results, I think addressing this decline deserves more policy consideration, and space in the discourse, than it鈥檚 getting right now.

I think it鈥檚 worse here

To be totally honest, Plan A for this post was to look at international data and either show that the decline is a broadly global occurrence (and thus likely due to some global phenomenon like smartphones rather than United States-specific policy choices) or that it was concentrated in the U.S. and a few other countries (and thus likely due to narrow policy choices).

But this question is incredibly difficult to answer.

The best source of information on international student performance is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, but . And PISA 2022 says that student performance suffered a sharp decline in most countries, as you might imagine post-pandemic.

The PISA results are also a reminder of something that I think many Americans don鈥檛 know: America鈥檚 overall educational performance is  for a rich country.

Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe. You used to be able to break out PISA scores by state, which would typically show things like. But that breakdown is no longer available.

But the main point I want to make about the 2022 PISA is that scores  in almost every country. One of the few exceptions is China, which I take with a grain of salt because they only provide data for a few disproportionately upscale cities rather than offering a nationwide snapshot the way other countries do.

This confirms that the pandemic was a big deal for education. Notably, it was a big deal for education everywhere. A lot of the best evidence we have that blue state officials did not handle school closures well (see David Zweig鈥檚 book 鈥溾��) comes from the fact that European schools were open. The public health consequences of that were mild, and it鈥檚 a good reminder that you don鈥檛 need to be some kind of MAGA superfan to see that there was a problem with the most cautious responses. On the other hand, the scores really did go down a lot across , despite the schools being open, just as they  across the U.S.

What I would really like to know, though, is whether other countries have experienced a rebound since 2022, in contrast to America鈥檚 continued decline.

The two major countries for which I can find recent national test data are Italy and Japan. In Italy, there was a big Covid-related drop but they are  while in Japan they are following a similar trajectory to the United States but the .

Unfortunately, it鈥檚 hard to get really clear info on this until we get another round of PISA tests. If I had to guess, I would say that when the new PISA comes out, we鈥檒l see that the U.S. is on a worse trajectory than many peer countries. For now, though, that鈥檚 just speculation.

Not trying doesn鈥檛 work

What we do know is that federal K-12 policy used to place a hefty premium on 鈥渁ccountability鈥� for local school districts. Students were supposed to either demonstrate a solid level of results, or else show clear signs of improvement. If a district couldn鈥檛 achieve one or the other, there were supposed to be consequences.

There was significant bipartisan backlash to this accountability regime, and it was .

I find this backlash fascinating. The whole idea of 鈥淣o Child Left Behind鈥� (N.C.L.B.) had become a big national joke by the time the Every Student Succeeds Act passed and shifted schools away from accountability. Teachers union stakeholders didn鈥檛 like N.C.L.B. Conservative decentralizers didn鈥檛 like it. Normie high-S.E.S. parents were annoyed at their kids needing to take tests, and normie low-S.E.S. parents didn鈥檛 like to hear that their kids were doing badly in school. All around, almost everyone seems to have decided they鈥檇 prefer a system that put less emphasis on trying to tell whether kids were learning and taking action if they weren鈥檛.

Chad Aldeman makes an interesting point about this. He notes that if you look across the full range of subjects and grade levels, the declines are not particularly concentrated in any specific demographic group, but they are concentrated among the weaker students. The trends for 12th-grade math scores are particularly stark in this regard, but it鈥檚 not unique in the history of American education outcomes.

I think this is important because there鈥檚 been a huge backlash to heavy-handed 鈥渆quity鈥� policies in some blue cities, with more and more people suggesting that schools should place more of an emphasis on excellence at the top.

I favor excellence at the top, and I think  is a mistake. But broadly speaking, in the N.C.L.B. era of accountability at the bottom, all students were improving! In the post-N.C.L.B. era, the best students are doing okay and the weakest students are in crisis.

I can鈥檛 say exactly why, beyond the observation that if you were concerned federal focus on accountability for weaker students was holding the strong students back, that doesn鈥檛 seem to be the case.

My guess would be that even if schools drop the ball, the best students wind up doing okay thanks to a blend of natural ability, self-motivation, and parental supplementation. But when you hold schools accountable for results at the bottom, they have no choice but to pay attention to instruction methods that work, which has positive results for basically all students.

And I do think these broad structural incentives are important. Karen Vaites writes a great article about the nitty-gritty of literacy instruction. I really enjoyed this one about how the  does not work as well as mixing abilities within groups, but then leveling individual reading assignments. Vaites speculates as to why teachers may not be informed about and using best practices. But one might ask the opposite question: Why would teachers be informed about and using best practices? They鈥檙e busy. They have a really hard job. If the administrators up the chain are under pressure to deliver results, then they will research best practices and make sure people are using them. But if not, then , it鈥檚 easier to just lower standards.

Similarly, it turns out that a lot of school districts now use reading curriculum packages that don鈥檛 feature whole books, just passages. Some people say this is pressure to 鈥渢each to the test.鈥� But kids taught this way don鈥檛 do better on reading comprehension tests 鈥� they do worse. The best explanation, , is that the passages method is cheaper. Of course, if you鈥檙e accountable for results, you鈥檙e much less likely to just go with the cheapest option. If you鈥檙e accountable for results, you go with an option that works.

Exercise for the mind

A telling fact about American education is that , when an accurate assessment would be about a third of that.

Aldeman notes that this is partly a policy issue. School districts conduct assessments in the spring, but often wait until fall to tell parents how their kids did. He鈥檚 right that this lag doesn鈥檛 make sense and should be fixed. However, it clearly also reflects a certain amount of parental incuriosity and optimism. And we鈥檙e seeing, I鈥檇 guess, an inclination on the part of classroom teachers to be people-pleasers rather than deliver bad news to parents. But that in turn reflects the reality that a large share of parents want to hear positive things about their kids and their school more than they want accurate information.

That鈥檚 understandable; I also like it when people say nice things about my son.

But it鈥檚 almost impossible to get good performance without measurement. And with reading in particular, it feels to me like whatever鈥檚 happening in school, we鈥檙e also living through a national collapse of interest.

I am actually quite sure my kid is above grade level in reading because Kate and I make sure he spends a good amount of time reading almost every day (and also because teachers at his school are good about sharing assessments multiple times per year). And while a lot of the books that he reads are either kid-centric books or easy-to-read Y.A. fantasy, some of them are books that we suggest to him as challenges. It is more difficult for him to read more challenging books (obviously), but he can, in fact, do it and he does, at least a little bit, every day.

And pretty much everything in life is like this. I鈥檓 not someone who enjoys exercise, but if I skip it for a while, I get horribly out of shape. So I really try to drag my ass to the gym every week.

I recently joined a new one and, as part of a prescribed workout, got to do some comically easy bench presses. That was fun; I like that a lot more than working hard. But there鈥檚 no real point in that 鈥� you have to do things that are difficult or you don鈥檛 get any better.

I鈥檓 also trying this year to be much  by prioritizing whole books of fiction over nonfiction stuff on the internet for work or quasi-work. I鈥檓 really good at skimming informational content, which is part of how I do this job. But precisely because I鈥檓 good at it, it鈥檚 better exercise to do the other thing and work on my attention span. A lot of that is fun thriller type stuff (I鈥檓 working my way through  mysteries), but I鈥檓 also reading 鈥溾�� and thus finish the complete works of the Bront毛 sisters.

On some level that鈥檚 a bit far afield from the education policy questions, but I think it sort of all relates. Of course there are extrinsic factors at work 鈥� digital distractions, a pandemic, often troubled home lives, etc. 鈥� but on some level we鈥檙e suffering mostly from a big national failure to take the educational goals of the school system seriously. As I wrote in the inaugural issue of States Forum over the summer, this is , where the levels of spending on K-12 education are much higher but nobody wants to ask the basic questions about whether appropriate curriculums are in use or whether schools are doing a good job. It鈥檚 possible that because of AI, education will become less economically important in the near future. But in some ways that only makes it even more urgent that we avoid a situation where everyone gets mentally flabby, just zoning out to short-form video all day.

A decade ago, California schools introduced a new K-12 science curriculum that was hands-on, interactive and designed to prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century. 

But since the state started testing students on the new Next Generation Science Standards in 2019, the first time ever California assessed students in science, test scores have barely budged, with stark gaps among some groups of students.

鈥淚n large part, science has not been viewed as a priority. It鈥檚 been moved to the back burner,鈥� said Jessica Sawko, education director at the research and advocacy organization Children Now, and former head of the state鈥檚 association of science teachers. 鈥淏ut science needs to be a priority. How will we prepare our kids to make sense of the world around them?鈥�

In 2019, three years after most schools began teaching the new science curriculum, only 30% of students met the standard on the state exam. Last year, the number had inched up to only 30.7%.

Wide gaps exist among student groups. Among students whose parents graduated from college, 42% met the standard, compared to 17% of those whose parents never went beyond high school. Fewer than than 21% of low-income students met the standard. Only 15% of Black students met the standard, compared to 61% of Asian students.

Delays and obstacles

There鈥檚 a few reasons for the stagnant scores, experts said. Pandemic school closures set achievement back significantly for all subjects, but it especially affected science because so much of the new science curriculum centers on hands-on projects, which were nearly impossible to conduct over Zoom.

And after the pandemic, schools focused their recovery efforts on literacy, math and attendance, the most glaring challenges as students returned to in-person learning. Chronic absenteeism, for example, soared from 10% pre-pandemic to 30% in 2022. 

Another reason for the low science scores is accountability, Sawko and others said. For the first few years of the new science test, the scores were not posted on the state鈥檚 鈥� the primary means of publicizing students鈥� academic performance. The rationale is that the test was new and the state was still working out the kinks.

Last year, the results were posted at the bottom of the Dashboard in an area marked 鈥渋nformational purposes.鈥� Unlike the other features of the dashboard, such as math and English language arts scores, science was not color coded to indicate the performance level of individual schools or student groups. The science results were solid gray.

When the new scores are released this fall, science will be color-coded on the Dashboard, but science still falls short of full accountability, advocates said. Low-performing schools won鈥檛 be singled out by the state for extra assistance, although that might change next year.

Another obstacle has been teacher training. After California adopted the new standards, it didn鈥檛 invest any money in professional development until 2023. For many years, districts used their own funds or found private grants to pay for teacher training, but by fall 2020 at least 30%-40% of teachers had received no training in the new standards, according to a by the California Association of Science Educators. Teachers at low-income and rural schools received the least training.

In 2023 the state allotted $85 million to improve math, science and computer science education, but only about $1.5 million went to train teachers in science. The rest went to train teachers in math and computer science 鈥� which also recently got new standards 鈥� and to host family STEM nights and other activities. The money went to county offices of education to distribute locally. 

The grant expires in 2027, and it鈥檚 crucial that the state continue that investment, said Shari Staub, co-leader of the California Math, Science and Computer Science Partnership.

鈥淲e are daily faced with public health challenges, climate challenges, equity challenges 鈥� all the things a scientifically literate population should be able to address, not just for California but for the world,鈥� Staub said. 鈥淚f we鈥檙e not investing in science, we are not preparing students for the world they are entering.鈥�

Three-dimensional learning

The Next Generation Science Standards were created in 2011 by an education nonprofit called Achieve, with help from 26 states and dozens of science education experts. The idea was to make science more engaging and 鈥渢hree-dimensional,鈥� as the authors put it, by combining concepts from multiple scientific disciplines so students could discover patterns and systems. Students would gain critical thinking skills and a solid understanding of scientific concepts, largely by doing hands-on projects rather than listening to lectures.

Many school districts in California have embraced the new standards and seen scores improve. In fact, California public schools 鈥� particularly those in tech hubs 鈥� have some of the top science programs in the country. California students routinely win the National Science Bowl, Science Olympiad and other national competitions. 

For the most part, those districts invested their own funds early in the rollout to train their teachers. And they have strong support from parents, financial and otherwise. That amounts to PTA funds that teachers can use to pay for science field trips or extra help in the classroom, plenty of parent volunteers and an overall expectation that science education is a priority. 

None of the top-performing schools were Title I low-income schools, but they weren鈥檛 all homogenous affluent schools, either. Some had 25% or more low-income students, large percentages of English learners and diverse student populations. They might have PTA support, but they don鈥檛 receive much extra money from the state because they don鈥檛 have large numbers of high-needs students.

La Ca帽ada Unified near Pasadena, for example, received only $13,700 per student last year from the state, about $5,000 less than the state average. But more than 77% of students met or exceeded the science standards last year, some of the highest scores in the state. 

Each elementary school in the district has a science lab and an aide to assist with science projects. A summer camp called 鈥淪TEM-nauts鈥� pairs older students with younger ones for science-themed games and experiments. The high school offers five Advanced Placement science classes and a host of science-related extracurricular activities, including an astronomy club, neuroscience club and chemistry club. Students can do internships at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a quarter-mile from the high school.

鈥淚n our district, the science kids are the cool kids,鈥� said James Cartnal, assistant superintendent. 鈥淪cience is part of the culture here. We work intentionally and very hard to make it that way.鈥�

鈥楾hink like scientists鈥�

At Lawson Middle School in Cupertino, science is nearly everyone鈥檚 favorite subject. The science classrooms are boisterous places with students conducting experiments and trying to figure out solutions. The shelves are well stocked with beakers, scales and microscopes. Colorful tapestries of the periodic table hang from the ceiling. Anime renditions of the elements 鈥� including xenon, helium, germanium, cadmium 鈥� adorn the walls.

One recent afternoon, students in Emily Adams鈥� eighth grade science class did a lesson on measurements. Adams started by asking them why accurate measurements are important. Their answers: so astronauts know how much fuel is left in their rocketship; so truck drivers know if their vehicle will fit under an overpass; and so doctors know how much medicine they鈥檙e giving a patient.

Then they worked in groups to measure various objects, using an infrared thermometer, an electronic scale and other tools.

鈥淭his class is fun. I like all the labs, figuring out how things work in the real world,鈥� said student Neil Dhaman. 鈥淧.E. is my favorite class, but this is second.鈥�

Adams said the class was typical, in that she spends about 10 minutes explaining a few main concepts and the students spend the rest of the class on projects related to the concepts. 鈥淚 want them to focus on skills and critical thinking, not just regurgitate facts,鈥� Adams said. 鈥淚 want them to think like scientists.鈥�

Cupertino is in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to the Apple computer headquarters and dozens of tech start-ups. Google and Facebook are a few miles away. Despite the lure of six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley, Cupertino Union School District has very little turnover among science teachers, a key reason the science scores are so high, said Marie Crawford, the district鈥檚 director of instructional leadership and intervention. 

鈥淭he teachers know each other, work together, help each other out,鈥� Crawford said. 鈥淚t makes a big difference.鈥�

Like La Ca帽ada, Cupertino Union School District does not receive a lot of money from the state. Last year, the state provided $16,400 per student, far below the state average.

In teacher Maryhien Pham鈥檚 class, eighth grader Aanya Dhar and her classmates demonstrated how to find the mass of a marble by dropping it into a cylinder of water, and weighing the cylinder before and after. The answer: 3 milliliters. 

鈥淚 might want to be a scientist when I grow up,鈥� Dhar said. 鈥淚 like learning about new things, experimenting, getting to know how things work.鈥�

This article was and was republished under the license.

But the conditions under which English teachers work are detrimental to the cause 鈥� and while book bans are in the news, the top-down pressure to measure up on test scores is a more pervasive, more longstanding culprit. Last year, we asked high school English teachers to describe their literature curriculum in a national questionnaire we plan to publish soon. From responses representing 48 states, we heard a lot of the following: 鈥渟oul-deadening鈥�; 鈥渙nly that which students will see on the test鈥� and 鈥渢oo [determined] by test scores.鈥�

These sentiments certainly aren鈥檛 new. In a similar questionnaire distributed in 1911, teachers described English class as 鈥渄eadening,鈥� focused on 鈥渕emory instead of thinking,鈥� and demanding 鈥渃ramming for examination.鈥� 

Teaching to the test is as old as English itself 鈥� as a secondary school subject, that is. Teachers have questioned the premise for just as long because too many have experienced a radical disconnect between how they are asked or required to teach and the pleasure that reading brings them.

High school English was first established as a test-driven subject around the turn of the 20th Century. Even at a time when relatively few Americans attended college, English class was oriented around building students鈥� mastery of now-obscure literary works that they would encounter on the College Entrance Exam. 

The development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926 and the growth of standardized testing since No Child Left Behind have only solidified what was always true: As much as we think of reading as a social, cultural, even 鈥渟piritual鈥� experience, English class has been shaped by credential culture.

Throughout, many teachers felt that preparing students for college was too limited a goal; their mission was to prepare students for life. They believed that studying literature was an invaluable source of social and emotional development, preparing adolescents for adulthood and for citizenship. It provided them with 鈥渧icarious experience鈥�: Through reading, young people saw other points of view, worked through challenging problems, and grappled with complex issues. 

Indeed, a national study conducted in 1933 asked teachers to rank their 鈥渁ims鈥� in literature instruction. They listed 鈥渧icarious experience鈥� first, 鈥減reparation for college鈥� last.

The results might not look that different today. Ask an English teacher what brought her to the profession, and a love of reading is likely to top the list. What is different today is the  unmatched pressure to prepare students for a constant cycle of state and national examinations and for college credentialing. 

Increasingly, English teachers are compelled to use online curriculum packages that mimic the examinations themselves, composed largely of excerpts from literary and 鈥渋nformational鈥� texts instead of the whole books that were more the norm in previous generations. 鈥淰icarious experience鈥� has less purchase in contemporary academic standards than ever. 

Credentialing, however, does not equal preparing. Very few higher education skills map neatly onto standardized exams, especially in the humanities. As English professors, we can tell you that an enjoyment of reading 鈥� not just a toleration of it 鈥� is a key academic capacity. It produces better writers, more creative thinkers, and students less likely to need AI to express their ideas effectively.

Yet we haven鈥檛 given K-12 teachers the structure or freedom to treat reading enjoyment as a skill. The data from our national survey suggests that English teachers and their students find the system deflating. 

 鈥淥ur district adopted a disjointed, excerpt-heavy curriculum two years ago,鈥� a Washington teacher shared, 鈥渁nd it is doing real damage to students’ interest in reading.鈥� 

From Tennessee, a teacher added: 鈥淚 understand there are state guidelines and protocols, but it seems as if we are teaching the children from a script. They are willing to be more engaged and can have a better understanding when we can teach them things that are relatable to them.鈥�

And from Oregon, another tells us that because 鈥渟tate testing is strictly excerpts,鈥� the district initially discouraged 鈥渢eaching whole novels.鈥�  It changed course only after students鈥� exam scores improved. 

Withholding books from students is especially inhumane when we consider that the best tool for improved academic performance 鈥� students learn more when they become . Yet by the time they graduate from high school, many students  master test-taking skills but lose the window for learning to enjoy reading.

Teachers tell us that the problem is not attitudinal but structural. An education technocracy that consists of test making agencies, curriculum providers, and policy makers is squeezing out enjoyment, teacher autonomy and student agency. 

To reverse this trend, we must consider what reading experiences we are providing our students. Instead of the self-defeating cycle of test-preparation and testing, we should take courage, loosen the grip on standardization, and let teachers recreate the sort of experiences with literature that once made us, and them, into readers.

In eighth grade reading, the percentage of students on grade level or above in those schools grew at three percentage points over last year 鈥� from 36% to 39%. In math, the percentage of fourth graders on track in majority-Black schools grew from 36% to almost 40%, the latest i-Ready assessments from Curriculum Associates found.

Those are 鈥渂right spots鈥� in a snapshot that otherwise shows recovery has remained stagnant five years following the pandemic, said Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates. 

Black students 鈥渉ad a bigger dip, especially in the early grades, so they have more room to catch up,鈥� she said. But generally, performance has plateaued and there鈥檚 still a long way to go to reach 2018-19 levels. 鈥淚 think we have to hold ourselves accountable to at least that bar, but that’s not the end goal.鈥� 

The 2024-25 data, shared exclusively with 蜜桃影视, represents almost 12 million K-8 students in reading and more than 13 million in math who took the i-Ready tests during the last school year. Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the i-Ready adjusts questions to students鈥� level. The prompts are more advanced if kids are working above the benchmark and easier if they鈥檙e below, offering teachers a view, Huff said, of how much progress students need to make to catch up. Nearly half of fifth graders, for example, are on grade level in reading, while 29% are two grade levels or more below, the results show. The picture is similar in math, with 53% on target and 20% far behind.

While students are learning, they鈥檙e not mastering as much material as their peers did before COVID. Learning loss is more pronounced in the younger grades, confirming that even those students who were too young to attend school were affected by the disruption. Multiple studies have shown that economic hardship and fewer opportunities to socialize left less prepared for school. In reading, 60% of first graders 鈥� those who were toddlers during the early years of the pandemic 鈥� are on grade level. That鈥檚 down from 68% in 2018-19.

鈥楽light improvement鈥�

Majority-Black schools, however, were well behind majority-white schools before COVID 鈥� by roughly 20 percentage points. Their scores also saw a steeper drop off after the pandemic. 

About a year after the pandemic, McKinsey &Company, a consulting firm, used i-Ready data that students in majority-Black schools were a full year behind those in predominantly white schools, an increase of three months over the prior achievement gap.

鈥淏lack students were often at the lowest achievement levels in many districts,鈥� said Kareem Weaver, co-founder of Fulcrum, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that provides literacy expertise to school districts. 鈥淚t makes you wonder what was happening before for students to be at a level where even slight improvement is considered noteworthy.鈥�

If students don鈥檛 acquire strong reading skills and basic math facts in elementary school, they won鈥檛 be able to keep up with more challenging assignments, said Ameenah Poole, who worked as a high school administrator in East Orange, New Jersey, until 2022. Her former colleagues, she said, often wondered why students came to them as struggling readers and lacking proficiency in math. 

鈥淭hese foundational skills are paramount,鈥� said Poole, now principal of Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary in the district. 

In a school already not meeting expectations under the state鈥檚 accountability system, the pandemic just put kids further behind. Many parents in the 84% Black school have jobs in the service industry. Some are nurses, one drives an Amazon truck, Poole said, and most parents didn鈥檛 work from home when schools went remote.

A lot of students didn鈥檛 even log in to class, and rebuilding attendance routines has been slow and sometimes futile, she said.

鈥淭he culture during the pandemic and post-pandemic [was] that school was an option,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e say, 鈥業f you miss a day, you miss a lot.鈥� Students have to be here in order for us to teach them.鈥�

On New Jersey鈥檚 state test, 19% of third graders met the standards in reading in 2022. That鈥檚 the same year the district began using i-Ready. Students work on skills like phonics and vocabulary or measurement and geometry in 40-minute blocks every week. 

At first, the extra instruction didn鈥檛 translate into higher scores. In fourth grade, the percentage of students reaching the proficient level actually fell to 11%. But when those same students were fifth graders in 2024, Poole began to see the payoff. Thirty-five percent met or exceeded the goal. 

That still means the majority of students are working below grade level, which the i-Ready data also shows. 

Student learning is 鈥渕oving in the right direction,鈥� said Huff with Curriculum Associates, 鈥渂ut it’s not accelerating fast enough.鈥�

The way the i-Ready results are reported, however, could be hiding some improvement, suggested Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. 

Identifying the total percentage above and below the threshold doesn鈥檛 capture those students who may have moved up a level or two over time. Districts are 鈥渇ar from full recovery,鈥� he wrote in an from 28 states. But he concluded that $190 billion in COVID relief, the largest-ever one-time infusion of federal funds for schools, contributed to a significant increase in math performance during the 2022-23 school year. 

Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham City schools in Alabama, saw evidence of that in his district.

鈥淚 told the teachers, 鈥榊ou [will] have to teach like you’ve never taught before,鈥� meaning that we had to make up multiple grades within a year because of unfinished learning,鈥� he said. 

A 2024 Curriculum Associates showed that Birmingham, where 89% of students are Black and 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University the district for the same reason.

Leaders rearranged the calendar so that at the end of every nine-week session, students had a week off. But teachers provided optional instruction during that open week. About 7,000 students participated 鈥渨hen they didn鈥檛 have to come to school,鈥� Sullivan said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing the fruits of that.鈥�

Of course this phenomenon isn鈥檛 unique to education. But its problematic effects have played an outsized role in the K-12 arena in recent years.

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

But as has been , the decline in student achievement wasn鈥檛 just a pandemic phenomenon. The decline began much earlier, exacerbated during the retreat from consequential accountability, and steepened even more post pandemic.

As student outcomes remain moribund today, leaders in both parties are doing far too little to reverse these trends. This time around the obstacle isn鈥檛 COVID reopening battles or culture wars. It鈥檚 mainly about the of the political class to signal, in a bipartisan manner, that holding schools accountable for student learning must be the cornerstone of American education. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why have Democrats soured so much on testing and accountability? 

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

Since then, ordinary Democratic voters have taken notice.

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

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

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

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

Although we can鈥檛 disentangle cause and effect with precision here, this timing is consistent with political science research that shows voters often take cues from political leaders, rather than independently forming opinions first and influencing politicians.

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

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

But even if it can’t or won’t, all of us here at the Center for Assessment 鈥� and many others 鈥� think states should anyway.

Statewide exams are designed to serve four critically important purposes: monitoring of statewide educational growth and achievement; evaluation and continuous improvement; transparency and public engagement, and the signaling of expectations for student learning.

State education leaders and policymakers must monitor students鈥� educational opportunities and outcomes so they can provide the kinds of resources schools need, such as reading intervention for students or specialized training for teachers or principals. High-quality statewide standards-based achievement tests are well-suited to this work because they are designed and administered to yield comparable scores across students, schools and districts.  

State and local leaders also need data to help schools improve and to evaluate programs and initiatives. State tests are not designed to improve instruction in real time 鈥� that鈥檚 a job best handled by classroom assessments. But the state exams play a powerful role in clarifying the bigger picture. For instance, across a district or state, which curriculum and instructional programs are working?

To answer that question, state and district leaders conduct or commission a study, using a range of information that sheds light on student learning. Assessment results are a crucial piece of that picture. Understanding patterns in student performance in fourth grade reading, for instance, helps leaders figure out how to better support reading instruction in fourth grade. 

State test results help the public understand how well K-12 education is working. Public education is a foundation of democracy and one of the largest budget items for state and local governments. The public has a right to understand how these funds are used and whether school districts provide their students with meaningful learning opportunities. 

Comparable statewide test scores are an essential source of information to support efforts to build public trust and increase this type of transparency. Many other indicators of schooling, such as readiness for college or work, should also be publicly reported, but student academic outcomes should be featured. 

High-quality statewide tests that embody state content standards also serve an important signaling function: They help teachers, students, principals and district leaders understand intended learning goals by providing explicit depictions of the content standards. It鈥檚 one thing to show someone a third-grade math standard; it鈥檚 another to show someone the test question that reflects that standard. That鈥檚 when the intended learning goals really come into focus. 

State exams are in a uniquely powerful position to do all this work. They are subjected to higher-quality standards than any other test. They are thoroughly evaluated by local educators, state technical advisory committee members 鈥� independent national measurement experts 鈥� and fellow teachers through the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 peer-review process. 

State tests must document that they meet agreed-upon key criteria, including validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and comparability. These criteria are elaborated in the bible for testing professionals, , and the . These documents provide a shared understanding of quality and guide the work of state testing professionals and their assessment company partners.

District leaders and others have pressured states to replace their annual exams with their favorite interim or benchmark test. The rationale is simple and somewhat compelling: 鈥淲e already use Assessment X three times each year, and we like the results. Why do we also need a separate state exam?”

The answer is straightforward. The level of independent review and evaluation state exams receive, and the resulting transparency, far exceeds that of any other K-12 assessment. Commercial exams are not designed to support the purposes I鈥檝e described, and none have met the technical requirements that state assessments must meet. 

Educators want state assessments to serve critical purposes, and these exams have met rigorous quality standards to do so. They are crucial tools for monitoring the achievement and growth of all students in the state, evaluating programs, providing a way to report transparently about schooling in the state, and signaling to teachers and leaders important information about the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn. States must not give up on them even if the federal government takes its foot off the pedal. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through our work with school districts such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Syracuse, New York, and states including Indiana and Louisiana, and have had a front-row seat to the challenges and opportunities in assessment strategy. We鈥檝e seen what works, what doesn鈥檛 and what it takes to design a system that serves students and teachers. Too few districts actually know what they are trying to accomplish with all the tests they administer. 

Districts should consider three issues in addressing assessment overload:

• Test volume: Especially in grades K-8, teachers spend too much time preparing for and administering tests, while students lose precious classroom hours 鈥� as many as 100 per year 鈥� taking redundant exams instead of engaging in meaningful learning. Excessive testing exhausts students and frustrates teachers without always giving them what they need most: insights they can use to improve learning.
  
• Usefulness of test reports: Most district-mandated assessments are off-the-shelf products that deliver results quickly but not necessarily usefully. Districts, teachers and families rely on these tests in good faith, only to receive data that compare students to one another (think percentiles) rather than to the grade-level standards they need to master.
  
• Incoherence: To boost student outcomes, districts often add tests without retiring others. Leaders of various central office departments 鈥� special education, literacy, multilingual learning and the like 鈥� procure their own exams, without coordinating to consider 鈥渢wo for one鈥� opportunities. The result is a tangled mess of assessments that overlap, confuse and overwhelm. In some districts, we’ve seen as many as 15 assessments in play, with each serving a different purpose.听

Although the problem is layered, the solution is straightforward: Districts need fewer, more instructionally useful assessments. A strategic approach can transform how schools measure progress, decrease costs and stress, and help students and teachers focus on what matters: learning. 

In our organizations鈥� work helping states and school systems use more effective assessments, we鈥檝e seen district leaders make great decisions that resulted in more streamlined exams. (Together, we鈥檝e published a to guide other districts through a similar process.) We recommend that every district take these four actions:

Build a unified leadership team. Districts must bridge internal divisions among departments. A strong assessment redesign team should involve curriculum leaders, testing experts and specialists in multilingual and special education (at minimum) to establish the purpose and guiding principles for assessment planning, asking how exams contribute to and and help measure progress toward achieving the district鈥檚 broader vision for learning.

Audit and streamline tests. Districts must scrutinize every exam: What is its purpose? Does it deliver insights that educators can use to plan their next moves with students? Which truly help teachers teach, and which are just filling up time? By focusing on fewer but higher-quality assessments, districts can reclaim valuable instructional time and ensure that every test adds value for teachers and students. ANet鈥檚 assessment audit across Louisiana revealed that seventh-graders were losing up to 22 instructional days per year due to a bloated assessment system. Post-audit, 15 Louisiana districts reclaimed an average of five days of school per year.

Engage educators in the redesign. Teachers bring a critical perspective to assessment selection and use. Districts should bring educators into the process early and often, seeking their insights on which exams work, which don鈥檛 and how testing can be improved. In Syracuse, the district鈥檚 leadership team convened a committee of teachers and principals who reviewed the nearly 70 local assessments for K-8. With this educator input, the district eliminated many duplicative assessments and clarified the purpose and use of data from others.听

Communicate the new approach. If educators understand why certain tests were removed and which remain, they鈥檒l get on board, and when teachers are invested, students benefit. We recommend first cultivating the support of a team of influential educators and community leaders. In our work with districts across multiple states, there was a clear trend: Districts that engaged parents and teachers early 鈥� explaining the 鈥渨hy鈥� behind changes 鈥� saw higher buy-in and smoother implementation鈥�. After a well-communicated assessment redesign process in Madison, 97% of school leaders supported the district鈥檚 vision for the role of assessments, up from 44%. 

Exams don鈥檛 have to be a burden. By committing to fewer, more purposeful assessments, districts can lighten the load on educators and sharpen their focus on student outcomes systemwide. We鈥檝e seen districts successfully transform their approach to assessment and witnessed the pain points in districts that have not yet done this critical work. 

The solution isn鈥檛 more tests, it鈥檚 the right tests. That鈥檚 how to give teachers the insights they need and students the learning they deserve. 

鈥淓ven if the feds decide that they’re not going to require statewide assessments, that is not something that I’m going to buy into,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he moment you lower standards, you do kids a disservice.鈥�

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

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

鈥淭his is one of the discussions that the department, the administration, the Senate and House need to talk through,鈥� said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a right leaning think tank that supports Trump鈥檚 agenda. 

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

鈥淪tates that do not want to be transparent about their testing results simply aren’t,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you don’t believe me, just go and try and find the results for any state.鈥�

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

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

鈥淪en. Rounds鈥� bill simply has federal programs as money streams,鈥� he said. 鈥淣o policy attached.鈥�

Since the pandemic, a handful of states, like Oklahoma, and , have rolled back expectations for passing state tests. The changes are likely to result in more students reaching grade-level targets even if they haven鈥檛 learned more. The trend has revived debate over the 鈥渉onesty gap鈥� 鈥� the discrepancy between NAEP鈥檚 higher standard for proficiency and the often lower bar set by states. 

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

鈥淎t the end of the day, states are going to determine this,鈥� he said. 鈥淟et’s give them the freedom to do that.鈥�

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

The major components meet the threshold of what Barone describes as the 鈥溾�� for accountability. 

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

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

鈥淥ver the years, a consensus has formed that you want certain guardrails in place,鈥� Barone said.  

鈥楢 federal backstop鈥�

Observers don鈥檛 expect Rounds鈥� bill to get very far. But some call it a harbinger of a return to the days , the strict accountability law that preceded ESSA. In the 1990s, just a fraction of states tested students every year and many imposed no consequences for failing schools. 

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

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

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

鈥淚f you get rid of accountability, you’re just essentially giving [states] a blank check,鈥� said Stephanie Lalle, communications director for the Democrats on the House education committee. Federal mandates, she said, are how you push them to 鈥渘ot discriminate and incentivize them to close the achievement gap.鈥�

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

The landmark education law, which set strict testing and accountability requirements in exchange for Title I funds, passed in 2002. Data shows the policy led to nationally, but it quickly became highly unpopular. The law set ambitious goals for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, but drew considerable pushback from critics who said it led schools to teach to the test. But even if states continue their own testing and accountability systems, Guidera doesn鈥檛 want Washington out of the picture.

“We need the federal backstop,鈥� she told 蜜桃影视. 鈥淲e have to have high standards, and we need to be honest with ourselves about where every child is.”听

鈥楢 rallying cry鈥�

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

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

鈥淲hat if nobody was checking your speed?鈥� he asked.

State leaders have been thinking about the possibilities.

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

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

鈥淲e’ve got better assessments that tell us more about our students,鈥� Eric Mackey, Alabama state superintendent, said during a in March.  

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

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

Marianne Perie, an assessment expert who advises states on test design, said she wouldn鈥檛 be surprised if Oklahoma completely stopped giving statewide assessments. In March, state Superintendent Ryan Walters questioned the integrity of the 2024 results, even though they were included in for districts and schools.

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

Such states 鈥渉ave championed their gains in the last few years,鈥� especially in English language arts, she said. 

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

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

鈥淧arents are increasingly demanding accountability from their educational system, which will make sunsetting these assessments more complex,鈥� Oster said.

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

鈥楥ome up with something better鈥� 

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

ESSA allows the secretary to excuse states from annual assessments. That鈥檚 what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did in 2020 during the pandemic. She waived the accountability provisions for both 2020 and 2021. Barone sees no reason why McMahon wouldn鈥檛 do the same. 

A former Democratic staffer in the House, he thinks it would be hard to improve on the existing testing regimen. But even he agrees that the accountability side of the equation hasn鈥檛 led to measurable progress in how states support 鈥� and attempt to turn around 鈥� their most troubled schools. 

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

鈥淭here’s not a lot of evidence that even those that are doing it are doing it well,鈥� Barone said. Maybe Trump鈥檚 planned overhaul of the federal role in education, he said, is an opportunity to 鈥渃ome up with something better.鈥�

Candace Shaw, 34, founder of , earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spelman College in Atlanta and an MBA from Georgia State University. Her for-profit company 鈥� which recently opened a nonprofit arm to help those who can鈥檛 afford to participate 鈥� serves children from K-12. 

Shaw first discovered her love for mathematics around the age of 6. She said her family split their time between New York and Georgia, where she had access to a large whiteboard. She would often ask her parents and older siblings to leave complex math problems there for her so she could spend the day solving them. 

Her sister, Melinda Shaw, 38, is the company鈥檚 CEO and co-owner. She earned her bachelor’s from Albany State University in Georgia in addition to a certificate in medical science. She said her sister鈥檚 advanced ability in math prompted her to dive into it further. 鈥淲e always had a positive competition in our family in terms of academics,鈥� she said.  

The sisters鈥� parents are both registered nurses: the women credit them for their success. 

鈥淢y parents instilled a love of education in us by teaching us our history and showing us the amazing things that our ancestors did,鈥� Candace Shaw said. 鈥淚t made me have pride and confidence that I was capable of being intelligent so that I could do things to change the world.鈥�

蜜桃影视 chatted with the female entrepreneurs just in time for Women鈥檚 History Month and as their nine-member company recently opened its first brick-and-mortar tutoring center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Designed in an open-concept style, it includes a small office space and backyard for outdoor learning.  

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

蜜桃影视: Why did you found this company? What was the need you were trying to fill? 

Candace: Before 2020, I was working in the corporate world and I still had this passion for math. I was doing private tutoring 鈥� I had two clients I would work with 鈥� and their parents really loved it. It brought me joy and so in 2020, when the pandemic hit, word of mouth spread, and more parents started calling to ask me for help. I began virtual tutoring and built a website for parents to book sessions. We have a house in East New York (Brooklyn) and we opened a room on the first floor for kids to learn. They would come on Saturday mornings or afterschool for in-person sessions. 

Melinda: Candace and I had talked about this for many years prior to opening. We both were STEM majors and we noticed there were a lot of different disparities in communities of learning, so many different learning gaps and limited access to certain services.

You serve kids K-12. Describe your average student. 

Melinda: We serve a lot of students in the second and third grade. That鈥檚 when a lot of testing begins and homework increases. Parents are starting to see what level their child is at  鈥� and where they want them to go. At the middle school level, we serve a lot of seventh graders and in high school a lot of 10th through 12th graders. Many have college exams they are preparing for.

Do you see any difference in the types of problems students face based upon their grade? Elementary versus middle and high school-aged? 

Melinda: There is disparity overall in education. Sometimes, it falls within race and sometimes it falls in income or socio-economic level. It also depends on which district you are in, the curriculum they purchased and how that is determined. Some students in the third grade don鈥檛 get homework while others are homework heavy. There are so many reasons as to why a student is more proficient than others. 

How many schools do you work with and where? 

Candace: We work with at least 10 schools and they are all in Brooklyn. We have some in District 19 in East New York, some in Bedford Stuyvesant 鈥� and we just opened up to some in Canarsie. 

How exactly do you deliver your tutoring services? 

Candace: We have a few online offerings but we prefer in-person. We started after the pandemic, and most parents would say, 鈥淚 really need it in-person because my child learns better that way.鈥� 

What makes your service unique? 

Candace: We have a genuine investment in these children鈥檚 education. And we approach math in a way that鈥檚 fun and not scary. We allow students to learn at their own pace and in their own learning style. We provide supplemental events and activities 鈥� a Pi day party, holiday parties, back to school events. And we do giveaways. Also, our staff is highly qualified: These are all people with math degrees, engineering degrees 鈥� or they are statisticians. Most come from Brooklyn, from the communities we serve. It鈥檚 great to see that. A lot live walking distance away.

Melinda: We also serve students who are neurodivergent, people of all learning abilities. We live here, we understand what it is people want. We also say the children are our future. If that鈥檚 the case, and we are relying on them to maintain the community, we have to pour into them. They have to be innovative, sharp and fast thinkers. We are using math to build these skills which are transferable to real life.

How do you address math anxiety, which can be even more prevalent in communities of color? 

Melinda: We don鈥檛 remind the student that they have that anxiety. We reinforce what they do know, what they have done correctly. We highlight the points they are excelling at even if they are really minor. We don鈥檛 reinforce their fear or whatever is hindering their success. We focus on non-verbal cues, how they respond: Are they foot tapping? Are they having to go get snacks? We allow them to release when they need to release and then reel them back in. Over time, we can reduce that anxiety, highlight what they are greatest at and lessen that fear, which is really a lack of understanding of the subject.  

Candace: We reduce embarrassment and shame. We say mistakes are OK, that mistakes are some of the best ways to learn, which makes them feel safe to fully try. We also talk to parents about things they can do at home to support their child鈥檚 learning. And we create an environment where math is fun for everyone. When we have events for families and parents are involved, we ask them math questions, and if they got it right they could spin a wheel and get a gift. 

How does it feel to be a Black female entrepreneur, knowing your very existence in this space could impact the lives of the children you serve? 

Candace: It feels incredible to stand beside other Black women paving the way to change and innovation. It also feels like I have to balance being a Black woman and being a leader, which can sometimes be overwhelming. But then I try to lean into self care and give myself grace. I hope this inspires the children I work with to follow their wildest dreams. I want them to know there鈥檚 a place for them in this world. You don鈥檛 have to only look up to what鈥檚 portrayed in the media as success because there鈥檚 so many different ways to be successful. You just have to find what works for you 鈥� and be the best at it.

What do you want for the children you serve?

Candace: I want these kids to excel at math, to go to class and get As on assessments, to be above grade level. I want them to be strong and confident with a solid math foundation. I want them to form a strong STEM identity, to see themselves as engineers, coders, architects, to be able to know they can excel in those fields. 

Results from the 2024 (NAEP) showed that only a third of students are reading at grade level. On the International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an international assessment of math skills in 64 countries, American math achievement dropped 18 points for fourth graders and 27 points for eighth graders between 2019 and 2024. In both grades, American students were outperformed by peers in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and many European nations. 

Lawmakers need to take action to drastically improve student outcomes, and President Donald Trump鈥檚 promises to put parents in the driver鈥檚 seat and ensure states are in control of their education policymaking could be good steps in that direction. But a few federal K-12 education policies are mission-critical and should remain in place to fuel this effort. 

One is the federal requirement that all states administer annual tests that measure learning for every student in third to eighth grades and once in high school. This critical backstop protects states from powerful special-interest groups seeking to eliminate the transparent information about student achievement that state tests provide.       

Massachusetts鈥� November election results demonstrate the power of these groups. The Massachusetts Teachers鈥� Association reportedly contributed over $7 million to the campaign to eliminate the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which measures 10th graders鈥� knowledge of English, math and science as a graduation requirement. 

Although most students pass the MCAS on their first attempt, the union pointed to the achievement gap among groups of students surfaced by test results as a reason to eliminate it. In November, voters approved a ballot measure to eliminate the MCAS as a graduation requirement, effectively weakening high school diplomas for all students in the commonwealth.

Unlike report cards and observations, which are subjective, statewide assessments are the only source of objective and comparable information about student performance. These exams provide policymakers and the American public with important insights on America’s readiness as a nation to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. 

These assessments also supply parents with transparent information about how well their child is being served. State tests provide apples-to-apples comparisons about the performance of a school relative to others 鈥� information that is essential for enabling families to make informed decisions about what鈥檚 best for their children.

Arguments against testing often focus on the ways in which educators respond to assessments by narrowing the curriculum, but those issues point to a lack of instructional leadership, which is not resolved by eliminating a test. Others complain about the inability of annual state tests to provide timely data to help inform day-to-day instruction. While very important, this is not the purpose of yearly assessments. Rather, a continuum of tests, including benchmarking exams and daily knowledge checks, ought to be used to inform school- and classroom-level instruction.

Finally, there are those who simply don鈥檛 like the results of the assessments and seek to eliminate them rather than using them to ensure learning for all students. This is a little like blaming a thermometer for a fever. As a nation, America cannot afford to hide from the truth. The nation’s education system needs to improve, and assessments are the way to measure progress. 

Without statewide assessments, parents, educators and policymakers lose access to clear, comparable information about student performance. This will not prepare children better; it will hurt them. It will not empower parents to make informed choices about their children鈥檚 education, but rather obscure critical information. The federal requirement for states to administer annual assessments provides important cover against special interests’ efforts to eliminate transparency.

Now more than ever, all students should have access to an education that will prepare them for the 21st century. As the Trump administration works to connect the dots among education, the workforce and the economy, it can empower state leaders and parents by continuing the federal requirement for statewide annual assessments. This federal role is the best way to protect systems from special interest groups and ensure policymakers, parents and the American public have the clear, transparent, meaningful data they need about how well students are learning.

Those findings emerge out of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card. Amid an otherwise-disastrous release of fourth- and eighth-grade scores last month, experts hailed the emergence of a new hierarchy of educational excellence that largely runs through the South.

There鈥檚 a catch, however: That revised national leaderboard is visible only after researchers account for the wide variety of student populations in each state. to the 2024 NAEP were produced by the left-leaning Urban Institute, which has long applied statistical controls to scores in an attempt to develop a more precise understanding of how well schools are teaching children. 

At the heart of the effort is an acknowledgment that student demographics are not evenly sorted across state borders. Black students live across the Deep South, while English language learners are to be found near the Mexican border. Perhaps most prominently, rates of child poverty below the Mason-Dixon line than above. Higher or lower concentrations of these student groups, which have all historically posted lower NAEP scores, can heavily sway states鈥� performance in ways that may not accurately represent the quality of their schools and teachers, said Matthew Chingos, Urban鈥檚 vice president for education. 

Adjusting for demographic traits produces 鈥渕ore of an apples-to-apples comparison鈥� between different parts of the country, he added.

鈥淚f you want to go to a random state, ask a fourth-grader a math question, and have the highest chance of them getting it right, you鈥檒l probably be fine going to the place with the most white, high-income kids,鈥� Chingos said. 鈥淏ut if you want to randomly place a kid in the state where he’ll learn the most, then this list is a better approximation of that.”

To reach that approximation, Chingos and co-author Kristin Blagg used NAEP鈥檚 national data to compare test takers in each state directly against those of the same age, gender, race, socioeconomic background, special education status, and English language learner designation. These calculations effectively simulate a world in which Hispanic students, for example, are as plentiful in Maine as in Arizona. 

The consequent shifts are surprising. 

In NAEP鈥檚 raw (statistically unweighted) scores for fourth-grade math, the one subject in which American students made significant gains over the last two years, the top 10 states were Massachusetts, Florida, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, Texas, and New Jersey. But only four of those (Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Indiana) remained among the top 10 in Urban鈥檚 estimates. Strikingly, New Hampshire and North Dakota actually fell to the 11th- and 12th-worst in the country after controlling for demographics. 

Inter-state contrasts can be even more stark. New Jersey eighth graders earned an average reading score of 266 second-best in the U.S.), while their peers in Arkansas scored 255 (tied for tenth from the bottom). In Chingos and Blagg鈥檚 report, however, the two states are nearly identical.

Among all states, Urban measured Mississippi 鈥� which underwent a much-celebrated academic revival over the past decade 鈥� as receiving the highest adjusted scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math, as well as fourth-grade reading. It nearly grabbed the top spot in eighth-grade reading for good measure, finishing just behind Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Georgia. A (illustrated and by education advocate Marc Porter Magee) also placed Texas, Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, and Kentucky among the top states after averaging all four age/subject combinations.

Carrie Conaway, a senior lecturer at Harvard who previously served as chief research officer at Massachusetts鈥檚 state education agency, said that both raw and adjusted scores provide an important lens on the true extent of learning. But when local leaders want to benchmark their results against other states鈥�, she added, Urban鈥檚 release is 鈥渢he only way to do it.鈥�

鈥淚t’s not that one measurement is better than the other, it’s that each question comes with a different set of assumptions and conclusions you could draw,鈥� Conaway said. 鈥淏ut I do think that more people are interested in the question of whose system is the best, independent of demographics.”

A matter of perspective

The unavoidable reality is that states must educate the students who actually enroll in their schools. No amount of empirical maneuvering will change those headline numbers.

Yet Urban鈥檚 alternative perspective undoubtedly reflects some authentic improvements in school outcomes. Not only did the adjusted scores for Louisiana rank second only to Mississippi, the state also saw some of the fastest-growing raw scores on the 2024 round of NAEP 鈥� including the only significant ascent in elementary literacy anywhere in the United States since 2019.

Those strides have accompanied the implementation of of reading instruction that was consciously modeled after strategies first adopted by Mississippi. But it is difficult to identify which factors led directly to better achievement, Chingos said, arguing that any theories about how learning gains were accomplished would have to allow for the fact that states 鈥渉ave done a whole bunch of things over a long period of time.鈥�

鈥淚n Florida, was it the , the , or something else? In Massachusetts, was it or the ? You seldom see a clean story like in Mississippi, where they did a big overhaul of reading instruction, and they saw reading scores go way up,” he said.

Some also question the importance of rankings themselves. Derek Briggs, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in student evaluation, said that he was more interested in examining the rise or fall of scores over time rather than states鈥� comparative positioning on a list. Adjustments like Urban鈥檚 have value as a way of delving into the results of a one-time exam, he continued, but they are ultimately less useful in the context of NAEP, which tracks each state鈥檚 performance going back to the 1970s.

鈥淚f the perspective you’re taking is to look at trends and change over time, then in some sense, it doesn’t matter that certain states begin in different positions,鈥� said Briggs. 鈥淵es, you can see that the states are in different spots in the original year, but what you really want to focus on is the change.鈥� 

Chingos conceded that top-down ordering is 鈥渁lways a little weird,鈥� particularly in the middle of the rankings, because changes of just a point or two in either direction can meaningfully alter how states perceive and present themselves. While he and his colleagues try to communicate the complex ways in which academic reality can be obscured by demographics, the response of state leaders is typically more predictable.

“The states that get adjusted up love this,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he states that get adjusted down ignore it.鈥�

鈥榃e take seriously our role as leaders鈥�

Few will have the option of ignoring the decline in student learning over the last decade, which worsened dramatically during the COVID era. According to a district-level study of the NAEP results conducted by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, just 6 percent of American students live in school districts where math and reading levels are higher than they were in 2019. And in areas with large numbers of minority and low-income students.

With the from Washington, states are attempting to launch an academic recovery that will accelerate growth for the kinds of student populations that feature prominently in the Urban Institute鈥檚 analysis. While their paths to improvement may not be easy to emulate, top-scoring states provide a model for stragglers. 

John White served as Louisiana鈥檚 superintendent of education between 2012 and 2020, when local schools 鈥� historically some of the lowest-performing in the country 鈥� . In an interview, he said he believed that states like Louisiana were able to reach disadvantaged student populations through assertive K鈥�12 oversight led by governors, legislatures and state education agencies. Many others embodied a more 鈥減assive鈥� approach that largely centered on dispensing resources to schools and districts, he argued.

鈥淚f you look at the states at the top of the Urban Institute list, you would have to say that it’s almost synonymous with those that have said, ‘We take seriously our role as leaders of classroom- and school-level change, and we don’t see ourselves just as rule makers and check writers,’鈥� White observed.

While significant differences exist among successful school systems, White said, the unifying element is usually a leadership class that willingly embraces its role as a guarantor of student success. Those responsibilities extend to the selection of high-quality curricula, the provision of teacher training in domains like the science of reading, and the maintenance of high standards and accountability for schools and teachers. 

In a recent essay, literacy advocate Karen Vaites Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama as beacons of reading growth for the rest of the country to follow. White agreed the region has gained momentum in recent years, adding that the 鈥済olden age鈥� of education reform was by Southern governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, and the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida. Along with strong state leadership, he said, particular features like unelected state superintendents and county-level school districts likely explain some of their progress. 

To policymakers in states that have struggled to boost student success, and particularly those whose NAEP scores fall after demographic adjustments, he recommended that the challenge be 鈥渢aken seriously.鈥�

鈥淚f you’re the state chief in a place like that, the question in front of you is how to use the tools you have to systematize a long-term approach to change,鈥� he concluded. 鈥淚 don’t see any evidence 鈥� and Massachusetts has proven so for decades 鈥� that you can’t systematize improvement over multiple years.鈥�

Interim reading assessments frustrate teachers and students and devalue what students are learning, even though they鈥檙e intended to provide useful information about student progress and help teachers target instruction throughout the year. They have not moved the needle on reading proficiency or reducing inequities, as new confirm.

Today, we鈥檙e issuing a clarion call to assessment stakeholders at all levels: Do better for teachers, so they can do better for students.

Right now, periodic reading tests prompt students to 鈥渇ind the main idea鈥� or identify a 鈥減oint of view鈥� 鈥� discrete standards and skills that don鈥檛 add up to reading comprehension. They are misaligned with the on how kids learn to read well and ignore the foundational role of knowledge in reading comprehension. Reading is a meaning-making endeavor, and comprehension is an outcome that occurs when readers apply a dynamic set of reading processes and knowledge to a text.

But that鈥檚 not what we鈥檙e measuring. Consider this fourth-grade Reading Standard 3 for literature: 

Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character鈥檚 thoughts, words, or actions).

Students could miss a test item tied to this standard because of weak decoding skills, insufficient vocabulary, difficulties parsing syntax or transitions, or insufficient background knowledge. Often, it鈥檚 a combination of these factors, not misunderstanding the standard itself, that contributes to a wrong answer. But the interim assessments we give students today can鈥檛 identify what went wrong.

Reporting test results by standards, strategies, genre or any single construct confuses cause and effect. Answering a question based on a standard is an effect of comprehension, not a cause. And a student鈥檚 response to any one question tied to a standard does not predict how well that student will do on a similar question using a different text.

It鈥檚 time to transform. Few schools 鈥� or teachers 鈥� will move to text-focused classrooms and abandon using standards as the organizing force for daily lessons if the assessments they鈥檙e provided use an outdated, ineffective approach. It鈥檚 a vicious and damaging cycle. There鈥檚 a better way.

Transforming Assessment Questions and Classroom Conversations 

We need new assessments that reflect the research base and diagnose the degree to which actual reading comprehension is occurring. 

Assessments should focus students on the most challenging sections of a text and pose questions that can determine whether students navigated the passage for meaning. Questions also should address what world knowledge can be learned from reading the text carefully. And, questions should focus on challenging vocabulary or phrases to see if students understand the contributions that vocabulary makes to meaning. Only then should tests feature standards-based questions that fit the text to determine if students鈥� comprehension reflects the depth and complexity called for by the standards. (For an example of this approach, see the Case Study .) 

Such assessments would provide more meaningful information and play a more powerful role in the classroom. Rather than issuing reports on mastery of this or that standard, assessment developers need to release their passages and items in full, along with guidance on how to discuss the results with students. Then teachers could use interim assessments to deconstruct student thinking in class, by revisiting reading assessment texts and asking students to share their thoughts, passage by passage, about each question they encountered and explain why they answered questions as they did. 

This is a low-tech, labor-intensive, and high-impact way to use interim data to inform instruction. We learn from our mistakes, and in the case of comprehension questions, the richest discoveries will come not from asking which items students missed, but by asking why. Students can go astray for a variety of reasons, and the best way to identify the path they followed, or where comprehension broke down, is to ask them what they were thinking. The challenges any text presents will vary, but the number and types of obstacles are not infinite. As obstacles are revealed, teachers 鈥� and eventually, students 鈥� can lead discussions that explore how best to overcome them. This collaborative approach enhances comprehension for all students, expanding their understanding by recognizing how ideas, language, and vocabulary interact with knowledge to make meaning. 

Deconstructing assessments with students connects instruction directly to the science of reading comprehension rather than treating reading as a disjointed series of atomized elements. Teachers might find that what they are already doing to support students鈥� reading comprehension is on the right track, but they need to do more of it, or some areas require less attention. Over time, teachers and students will recognize the nature of the various obstacles that complex text presents and how these can be addressed. In other words, assessments can do what is intended of them: inform instruction. 

Teachers face a learning curve, and these candid, text-driven conversations take time to do well. However, it is hard to imagine a more powerful way for teachers to support students in learning about texts, probing their thinking, tackling common challenges, deepening comprehension, and exploring the suite of constructs known as literacy. 

Contextualizing Assessments Is Key

An even more enduring and essential reform is to ensure tests actually measure what students are learning. Better interim reading assessments, then, would not only reflect the science of reading comprehension but they also would be based in curriculum and connected to the books and topics students study in class. 

This vision rejects the false premise that reading comprehension is a content-neutral skill that can be taught and tested in the abstract. Rather than asking students to address items tied to random passages they may not know anything about, a contextualized approach to reading assessment would offer a multidimensional view of students鈥� reading comprehension. It would be more fair, authentic and equitable, and would more accurately mirror the literacy tasks students will encounter after graduation.

It’s time to invest genuine energy and resources into creating interim assessments that provide actionable insights and align with research and the real world. Current assessments are standards-specific and knowledge-agnostic 鈥� the inverse of what research and experience tell us teachers and students need. This approach is a closed loop that is steering teachers and students off-course. 

Rather than assess frequently, study the error patterns in data meetings, map those errors onto matching discrete skills or standards, isolate those standards, and instruct teachers to repurpose reading into a relentless repeating pattern of practicing said standards 鈥� interim assessments, whether created by assessment providers or curriculum publishers, simply must focus on the real and varied causes of breakdowns in comprehension.  

Developers need to revamp their tests to tackle the challenges inherent in content-rich text. They need to abandon the practice of reporting by state standards, strategies or any other atomized element. They need to release items that allow teachers and students to thoroughly analyze and comprehend what students are learning. 

Designing the right tests will empower and incentivize the right teaching and make reading tests genuinely valuable to educators and students. The responsibility and power rests with interim assessment providers and publishers, as well as the state and local leaders who procure them. Test developers, hear our call: We need an interim assessment do-over.

Susan Pimentel is co-founder of StandardsWork, a nonprofit education consultancy that sponsors the Knowledge Matters Campaign. She was the lead author of the Common Core State Standards for English/language arts literacy and led development of the Knowledge Matters Review Tool. 

David Liben has worked with schools and districts nationwide to improve student learning for over 20 years.  He is the former principal of a high-performing school in Harlem and is the co-author of two highly acclaimed books on reading.

Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K鈥�12 schools. 

This week鈥檚 update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with 鈥渢he tsunami following the earthquake鈥� 鈥� a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

鈥淕iven all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,鈥� Kane said. 鈥淏ut no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.鈥� 

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3鈥�8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores 鈥� about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 鈥� represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that 鈥渢here were higher-impact ways to use the dollars鈥� to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,鈥� she said. 鈥淓SSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.鈥�

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study 鈥渄evastating.

鈥淲e already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,鈥� he wrote in an email.

鈥楾wo kinds of bad news鈥�

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,鈥� Reardon said. 鈥淥ne is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.鈥�

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the 鈥渘ew normal.鈥� If he鈥檇 been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

鈥淚 think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,鈥� Goodman recalled. 鈥淚 don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington鈥檚 relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn鈥檛 come close to reversing the full extent of COVID鈥檚 damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER鈥檚 final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure 鈥� just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds 鈥� states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement 鈥� meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

鈥淭his is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,鈥� Kane argued. 鈥淲e just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K鈥�12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn鈥檛 serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts鈥� budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,鈥� Sibilia said. 鈥淏ut I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.鈥�

Newly released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card, show that both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading 鈥� not just compared with the status quo of 2019, but also the most recent round of the exam, which was conducted during the heart of the pandemic. Math scores were flat for eighth graders and up slightly for fourth graders, but those gains were predominantly driven by the progress of high-performing students. 

The alarming results are in keeping with those revealed by earlier iterations of NAEP and highlight decade-long trends of both stagnation in overall academic growth and growing disparities between top students and their struggling classmates.

Jane Swift was the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 2001 to 2003 and now serves on the , the nonpartisan entity that oversees NAEP. In an interview, she expressed frustration that the country is still 鈥渟tuck where we were鈥� two years ago. 

“Everybody is tired of hearing about the pandemic,鈥� Swift said. 鈥淭his is not an issue that is driven solely by the pandemic. Looking at this data, it’s clear that we’re in enormous risk of losing an entire generation of learners unless we show some focus and leadership.”

The highest-achieving test takers continued to pull away, or at least hold steady, while lower-performing children lost yet more ground. In fourth-grade reading, only participants testing at the 90th percentile staved off a drop in scores; those at the 50th percentile fell by two points, and those at the 10th percentile experienced a four-point slip. In eighth-grade math, scores at the 90th percentile jumped by three points since 2022, while those at the 10th percentile fell by five points. 

Another notable divergence opened up on ethnic lines. While eighth graders from most demographic groups were statistically unchanged in reading over the last two years, Hispanic students fell dramatically: by five points on average, by eight points for those at the 25th percentile, and by three points even for better-than-average participants at the 75th percentile. 

In all, about two-thirds of eighth graders exceeded NAEP鈥檚 鈥淏asic鈥� level of achievement in reading, fewer than did so in 1992. Thirty-three percent of students about to head into high school placed below the Basic threshold, the most in the history of the exam. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, a NAGB member and education consultant who was previously the assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, said K鈥�12 policymakers had to acknowledge the persistent failure to alter the trajectories of low-performing students.

“If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,鈥� Rafal-Baer said. 鈥淭hey can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”

Some hopeful signs in math

Even with the abundance of bad news, some positive signs indicated the beginnings of a turnaround in math learning. 

Fourth graders climbed upwards by two points in the subject over the last two years, after dropping by five points between 2019 and 2022. While falling somewhat short of a major stride 鈥� again, higher-scoring students enjoyed significant gains, while those at the bottom of the distribution did not 鈥� it marks the first sign of post-pandemic progress on NAEP.

Bob Hughes, director of American K鈥�12 education programs at the , said that while it was critical to track year-to-year fluctuations in math scores, national leaders in government and philanthropy needed to focus more on the broader development of better tools and strategies to deliver math instruction. Compared with the decade-long coalescence of educators around the science of reading, which has taken hold in dozens of states around the country, no similar consensus exists for math, he argued.

Further, he added, a host of technological applications and tutoring models has continuously evolved since the emergence of COVID. While the best classroom use of such innovations is still to be discovered, Hughes described himself as bullish on their long-term prospects.

鈥淚 don’t think the technology is positioned now to be a magic bullet in solving some of the challenges we see on NAEP,鈥� Hughes said. 鈥淏ut there are some promising developments that, over time, should help us accelerate achievement amongst even students that are the farthest from standard.鈥�

Among results for individual states and school districts, often closely watched for exceptions to national or regional trends, comparatively few distinctions were in evidence. Fifteen states, mostly clustered in the Northeast and South, enjoyed a significant bounce in fourth-grade math compared with 2022 (Nebraska was the sole state in which scores declined over the last two years); still, only Alabama elementary schoolers are now farther along in the subject than similarly aged students in 2019. 

Another exception was Louisiana, the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher than in 2019. Notably, the state鈥檚 scores in fourth-grade math were also higher than in 2019, though not by a statistically significant amount. Local losses in eighth-grade math and reading were among the smallest of any state.

John White, who served as Louisiana’s superintendent of schools from 2012 to 2020, said the state鈥檚 progress was due to a long-running emphasis on the improvement of curricular materials and strong accountability.

鈥淭here have been changes to rules and programs over time,鈥� he said, 鈥渂ut the essence of the plan remains constant: select evidence-backed curricula, build teachers鈥� skill every day on the practices needed for those curricula, and be transparent about the results schools achieve.鈥�

White added that the 鈥渏arring鈥� results for the nation as a whole could not all be attributed to the hangover of COVID learning loss, and that education leaders have to arrive at a better understanding of how to improve them.

鈥淲e have to look deep within the test results themselves, and across a broad range of factors inside and outside of schools, to come to a stronger hypothesis than we have today,鈥� he concluded. 鈥淭hat should be a national priority, and if national leaders don鈥檛 lead it, prominent state and city leaders should.鈥�

That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that鈥檚 a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That鈥檚 the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates鈥� of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers鈥� workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

鈥淭he future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,鈥� said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates鈥� head of assessment and research. 鈥淚t is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.鈥�

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher鈥檚 popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do.听

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can鈥檛 just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media 鈥� watching, listening and reading in equal measure 鈥� to understand what they鈥檙e learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child鈥檚 abilities, since in all but the most special cases there鈥檚 little space between a child鈥檚 thoughts and his or her utterances. 鈥淚t’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,鈥� said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox鈥檚 chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates 鈥渃onfounding factors鈥� that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students鈥� voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what鈥檚 on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids鈥� understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children鈥檚 learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids鈥� voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

鈥楾hey shout, they whisper, they sing鈥�

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

鈥淪uitably impressed,鈥� Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn鈥檛 actually mastered the material 鈥� she鈥檇 simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. 鈥淪he had learned to hack the game,鈥� Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter鈥檚 ingenuity 鈥� but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to 鈥渋nvisibly and continuously鈥� quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can鈥檛 hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: 鈥淭hey shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,鈥� she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary 鈥渧oice engine鈥� that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon鈥檚 Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in 鈥済rown-up鈥� situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren鈥檛 built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox鈥檚 CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox鈥檚 AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

鈥淚f it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,鈥� said Kelly.

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI 鈥渃an be the great equalizer here,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 think it can help solve the literacy crisis 鈥� but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.鈥�

The terms of the November sale weren鈥檛 disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it鈥檚 still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she鈥檚 eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity 鈥� especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, 鈥淚 don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently鈥� when a particular student says it. 鈥淏ut I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.鈥�

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to 蜜桃影视.

While it looked like the number of students scoring at the lowest level dropped by over 12%, the reality was more complicated. 

鈥淐omparing 2023 to 2024 is challenging,鈥� David Johns, an associate superintendent, . In conjunction with the unveiling of new standards last year, the state for proficiency and performance levels. Below basic became 鈥渄eveloping鈥� and basic, 鈥渁pproaching.鈥� 

鈥淚t鈥檚 not exactly apples to oranges, but it’s like apples to apple juice,鈥� he said.

Wisconsin isn鈥檛 the only state that recently instituted changes that effectively boost proficiency rates. Oklahoma and recently made similar adjustments. lowered passing or 鈥渃ut鈥� scores in reading and math last year, while and are considering such revisions.

Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance. 

鈥淢any parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are ,鈥� said Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking students鈥� recovery from COVID learning loss. 鈥淟owering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.鈥�  

Even Jill Underly, Wisconsins鈥檚 education chief, confessed to some bewilderment about the process last year.

鈥淭he crummy thing is, I am an educator and I don鈥檛 understand it 鈥� so how are parents supposed to understand this too?鈥� she wrote in a June 2023 email. 鈥淔or example, what does Proficient mean vs. Advanced? That they are at grade level vs. the next grade level? I just hate this stuff so much.鈥�

The conservative Institute for Reforming Government, which obtained the email through a public records request and shared it with 蜜桃影视, is pushing the state to level with parents about poor student performance in the aftermath of COVID. 

Shifting the goal posts “sends a message that we are accepting post-pandemic levels for student performance and shows a lack of belief in every student,鈥� said Quinton Klabon, the think tank鈥檚 senior research director.

Chris Bucher, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, said Underly鈥檚 comments show she was 鈥渄oing her job鈥� by asking the department鈥檚 experts tough questions in an effort to make the complex calculations more transparent. To help explain the changes, the department released a of how it altered standards and cut scores. 

鈥楢n outlier鈥�

The scoring changes in Wisconsin and other states are likely to fuel fresh criticism of the 鈥渉onesty gap鈥� 鈥� the chasm between the disparate, conflicting measures states use to determine student progress and the , uniform standard for proficiency set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Known as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card, NAEP defines proficiency as 鈥渟olid academic performance鈥� and 鈥渃ompetency over challenging subject matter.鈥� It鈥檚 a higher bar than merely being on grade level and one that has long triggered debate. Education researcher Tom Loveless, formerly with the Brookings Institution, calls it 鈥�,鈥� and one of international tests showed that many students in high-performing countries couldn鈥檛 reach it.

But it鈥檚 a goal many states were striving toward just prior to the pandemic, when several commentators first about the 鈥渉onesty gap,鈥� and one some experts think states shouldn鈥檛 abandon. 

鈥淚t is the only common yardstick that is available to compare student achievement across states and across the large urban districts,鈥� said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. 鈥淔rom the board鈥檚 perspective, standards are not going to be lower for [kids] when they enter college or the world of work.鈥�

Frustrated with test standards in New York, Ashara Baker, a Rochester mother and state director of the National Parents Union, created her on student outcomes. While she included state data, broken down by race, she also cited NAEP proficiency rates as a comparison.

鈥淲hen you’re lowering these cut scores, clearly the goal is to show some sort of growth,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut I think we’re getting away from the actual goal of why we do assessments. They should really demonstrate where kids are struggling or where there is a gap.鈥� 

Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, a think tank, added that unlike grades on assignments and homework, state assessments should provide parents 鈥渙bjective鈥� information on how their children are doing. Schools also use them to determine which students are eligible for extra help. Lowering the bar, she said, means some students who need aid might not get it.  

鈥淭hese assessments are how we help identify students for extra support and assistance,鈥� she said. 鈥淣ow there will be a lot of kids that aren’t going to be getting those high-dosage tutoring sessions or who aren’t going to be getting that additional support in math that they might need.鈥�

As with most states, New York鈥檚 threshold for proficiency lines up with NAEP鈥檚 basic level, defined as 鈥減artial mastery鈥� of fundamental knowledge and skills, according to a from the National Center for Education Statistics. The report showed that at the time, Wisconsin had some of the toughest standards for reading and math in the country, which meant that a higher percentage of students fell short compared with other states.

That made Wisconsin 鈥渁n outlier鈥� Bucher said. 

鈥淥ur previous test scores made it appear kids were performing worse on standardized assessments than they actually were,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e listened to a group of experts 鈥� educators who are in the classroom each day teaching kids 鈥� who recommended we use cuts that align to our standards and take us closer to grade-level expectations.鈥�

Next month, NCES is expected to update its 2021 report with a new comparison of states鈥� proficiency cut scores and NAEP, one that is likely to renew criticism of the way states measure student performance. 

鈥淪tates that have been more ambitious are now sticking out like sore thumbs,鈥� Klabon said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 kind of a race to the bare minimum, rather than a race to the top.鈥�

鈥楢 sense of urgency鈥�

One state that is choosing to stick out is Virginia. Rather than calling it unrealistic, the state, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, is hoping to reach the ambitious NAEP standard.

The governor to the honesty gap in 2022, announcing sweeping changes to the state鈥檚 testing regimen that include stricter standards, assessments and cut scores. A new , which takes effect in 2025-26, is expected to label a majority of schools off track or in need of 鈥渋ntensive support.鈥� 

鈥淲e are not telling parents, students, teachers, policymakers and citizens the truth about where our children really are on mastering content,鈥� state education Secretary Aimee Guidera told 蜜桃影视. 鈥淲hy isn’t there a sense of urgency?鈥�

The 2021 NCES report showed that Virginia had the lowest standards for proficiency in reading. Virginia education officials pin its poor showing on decisions made by previous Democratic governors. In 2014, under former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the state passed a law requiring students to . And under former Gov. Ralph Northam, the State Board of Education in reading and math.

accuse the Youngkin administration of fueling a negative perception of schools in order to  private school choice, including education savings accounts, which in the state legislature last year. 

Virginia saw the largest decline in the nation in fourth grade reading on the 2022 NAEP test, dropping from an average score of 224 to 214. But 32% of students were proficient 鈥� same as the national average. On several other , including the SAT and exam, Virginia students have historically ranked near the top.

Advancing school choice was a 鈥渕andate for Youngkin and he has pursued it with dogged determination,鈥� said Cheryl Binkley, president of 4PublicEducation, a Virginia advocacy group. He has appointed school choice advocates to the state board, she said, and pledged to increase the number of .

But Guidera points to increases in and over $400 million the state provided to as evidence that leaders aren鈥檛 trying to 鈥渢ear down鈥� public schools.

Under a different Republican administration in Oklahoma, the opposite scenario is playing out. As 蜜桃影视 reported last month, the state education department, led by Superintendent Ryan Walters, made its state tests less challenging, especially in reading. In third grade, for example, 51% of students scored proficient or better, compared to 29% last year. 

Richard Cobb, superintendent of the Mid-Del district, near Oklahoma City, said district leaders know student performance has improved, but the department鈥檚 changes had the effect of artificially inflating the magnitude of the gains.

The move represented a break from work led by Walters鈥檚 predecessor, Joy Hofmeister, to align the state with NAEP鈥檚 stronger proficiency targets. In 2017, over 70% of students on average were performing at the proficient level through elementary and middle school on state tests, but only a quarter went on to earn a competitive score on the ACT test in 11th grade.

鈥淭he whole idea was trying to get an honest indicator of student readiness as early as third grade when kids start testing,鈥� said Maria D鈥橞rot, a former deputy superintendent in Oklahoma who traveled across the state with Hofmeister to explain the honesty gap to local superintendents. 

Their message wasn鈥檛 well received.

鈥淛oy’s adjustment to the cut scores was wildly unpopular and demoralizing,鈥� said Cobb, who has led the district since 2015. 鈥淣AEP should not be our target, and many superintendents told her that.鈥�

But in the summer of 2017, 121 educators met at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City to determine tougher cut points for each performance level. Just as the public, plummeted. The in third grade reading, for example, dropped from 72% to 39%.

Hofmeister, who was reelected in 2018, remains proud of that work, which she said would make students better prepared for college and a competitive job market.

鈥淚 remember feeling like this is worth it if it means I’m a one termer,鈥� she said.