[rewrite this title] Opinion | How Standardized Tests Reveal Our Children’s Learning Progress

Linda McMahon, unfortunately, is in agreement with President Trump’s executive order to dissolve the Department of Education, but that’s not the extent of her actions. With the significant job cuts she’s implemented, she has considerably weakened the federal government’s ability to collect crucial data on student performance, effective teaching methods, and literacy levels. The Institute of Education Sciences, responsible for this data collection, has been drastically reduced to fewer than 20 federal employees from over 175 when Trump began his second term, as reported by Jill Barshay for The Hechinger Report.

Even the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), hailed as the benchmark for national testing and referenced by McMahon in her congressional testimony to highlight American students’ struggles, might be in jeopardy. As Linda Jacobson from The 74 reported, the Department of Education “abruptly canceled” a long-term trend test of 17-year-olds, just a week after claiming the recent budget cuts wouldn’t impact the NAEP.

While standardized testing is not without flaws, and I understand the argument that it may restrict a teacher’s freedom in the classroom, there’s evidence suggesting that without these tests, parents are often unaware of their children’s weaknesses. This is partly due to grade inflation, where test scores have been decreasing while grades continue to rise, a problem that existed even before the pandemic and is often referred to as “the honesty gap.”

In 2023, Harvard and Stanford education professors Tom Kane and Sean Reardon published an essay based on their research titled “Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School.” I reached out to Kane to find out if there’s been any shift in student achievement or parental awareness since they wrote that piece. Kane remarked on our call last month, “Most parents have a vague idea of what their child is learning, but very few are aware of how it compares to children’s performance in 2019.”

Kane also pointed out that standardized test scores aren’t merely stressful obligations for students and teachers; they are predictive of long-term success. Based on a National Bureau of Economic Research paper co-authored by Kane, an improvement by one standard deviation in eighth-grade math achievement on the NAEP is linked to an 8 percent income increase, better educational outcomes, and reduced rates of teen motherhood, incarceration, and arrests.