There’s a bill under consideration in the Florida Senate that removes the teeth of state testing requirements for graduation. And Florida is not the only state working the refs — removing state testing requirements even as national test scores decline.
In order to graduate from high school and earn a standard high school diploma, Florida students must pass a standardized English Language Arts assessment in 10th grade and pass a statewide algebra test, or earn comparable scores on SAT or ACT exams. If the bill is signed into law, students won’t have to pass either test to graduate.
Florida would join Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska in lowering their testing standards or graduation requirements of late. After the absolutely dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 2024, which showed that a higher percentage of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading than at any point in the test’s 30-year history, you would think that states’ education leaders would be putting serious time and effort into helping their students thrive. The NAEP is a congressionally-mandated federal exam given to fourth graders and eighth graders every two years and 12th graders about every four years to track educational progress across the country.
All of this is reminding me of something President Trump famously said in the spring of 2020 about coronavirus, “‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” If we stop testing America’s students, we’ll have fewer bad headlines about how poorly they’re doing.
Unfortunately, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, agrees with President Trump’s executive order that the Department of Education should go away, but she hasn’t stopped there. As a consequence of massive job cuts McMahon has enacted so far, she has hobbled the federal government’s ability to gather statistics on student achievement, effective teaching practices and student literacy. The Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers this data, “is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration,” according to Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.
Even the NAEP, which is considered the gold standard of national testing, and whose data McMahon cited in her testimony before Congress to show how poorly American students are faring, may be at risk. The Department of Education “abruptly canceled” its national assessment of 12th graders just a week after saying “its recent round of cuts would not impact the National Assessment of Educational Progress,” Linda Jacobson of The 74 noted earlier this year.
Standardized testing isn’t perfect, and I am sympathetic to the argument that it can hamper teacher autonomy in the classroom. But there is evidence that without standardized testing, parents have little awareness of their children’s deficits, in part because of grade inflation — over the past few decades, test scores have gone down while grades have gone up. This issue, which predated the pandemic, is known as “the honesty gap.”
In 2023, Tom Kane and Sean Reardon, professors of education at Harvard and Stanford respectively, wrote a guest essay based on their research called “Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School.” I called Kane to see if since he wrote that piece, anything had changed with student achievement or parental knowledge. Kane mentioned the honesty gap and told me when we spoke late last month, “Very few parents have detailed knowledge of exactly where in the syllabus their child is, but even fewer know how that compares to where children would have been in 2019.”
He also said that standardized test scores aren’t just a stressful chore for students and teachers — they correlate with long-term success. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that Kane and others wrote, “a standard deviation improvement in a birth cohort’s eighth grade math achievement” on the NAEP, “was associated with an 8 percent rise in income, as well as improved educational attainment and declines in teen motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates.”
Furthermore, Kane and his co-authors have projected that if the recent declines in NAEP scores continue, they “would represent a 1.6 percent decline in present value of lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student.”
But there are other, more profound challenges when kids graduate from college without basic literacy and numeracy skills. College professors — even at elite schools — have been raising concerns about their students’ lack of reading comprehension for the past few years.
This is deeply unfair to America’s children, who deserve to be equipped with critical thinking skills, especially since understanding what is true in the age of social media is ever more challenging.
It’s not all hopeless. Some states and cities are succeeding, at least in reading. Many have written about the “Mississippi miracle”: how one of the poorest states in the union improved its reading scores. Louisiana has seen similar progress. Steubenville, Ohio — recently the subject of an American Public Media feature — “has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.” Steubenville is a small, economically depressed Rust Belt city where lots of kids live in poverty.
What all three of these bright spots have in common is that they are embracing the basics that we already know work well: identify struggling readers before third grade, and give them extra support. (There are almost no bright spots in math).
In Steubenville, this is in the form of “one-on-one tutoring in addition to the daily 90-minute reading class,” according to American Public Media’s Kate Martin, Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford. “The tutors include staff, community volunteers and local high school and college students.” The system is also addressing chronic absenteeism by deploying “a rapid response team” to students who aren’t attending school regularly.
It’s not magic. If we no longer have reliable federal test scores to measure states against each other and see what’s working, we won’t even have these small wins. We won’t know they’re happening in the first place.
End Notes
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I’m so sorry to report that I have been sleeping a lot better since I started putting my phone downstairs after 9 p.m. I will miss my revenge bedtime procrastination of looking at Zillow for houses I can’t afford in countries I may never visit, but I am really trying to turn over a new leaf.
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All I can think about is what’s going to happen on the last episode of “White Lotus.” Feel free to drop me your theories, or a note about anything else, here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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