Nearly nine in 10 parents in the United States believe that their child is performing at or above grade level in reading and math. Many, if not most, of them are wrong.
Actual proficiency rates among eighth graders are 30 percent in reading and 28 percent in math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or N.A.E.P. The gap between grades and test scores is particularly pronounced in schools serving higher proportions of low-income students, according to a 2023 study.
This problem has gotten worse over the past 15 years or so as grade inflation has increased. Between 2010 and 2022, average high school grade-point averages rose significantly — especially in math, to 3.32 from 3.02.
Meanwhile, standardized testing — one of the few independent checks on schools — is being undermined. Under federal law, states must administer annual standardized tests in math and reading in grades three through eight. But several states have recently lowered the score a child needs to be deemed “proficient,” producing big gains on paper without any change in the classroom.
Wisconsin redesigned its assessment, and English proficiency in the state increased to 48 percent from 39 percent. Illinois and Kansas have followed suit. In more than half of the states, proficiency rates on state reading tests now exceed the rates on national tests by 15 percentage points or more, and in some states the gap is much larger.
The federal government is making the problem only worse. In 2025, the Trump administration gutted the Education Department, which is behind the national test. Although some reports indicate that the agency has begun to rebuild, certain assessments have already been scaled back.
In other words, if you are a parent of school-age children, you can be paying close attention to their performance — and there is still a good chance that you do not really know how much they are learning.
There’s also another problem when it comes to understanding how well your child is doing in school: Parents tend to overweight grades when they think about whether their child needs more support. In 2025, we conducted an experiment in which we presented over 2,000 parents with scenarios in which a child’s grade and test score pointed in different directions. Then we asked them to estimate the time and money each scenario would require for academic support like tutoring.
In scenarios where grades were high, many parents saw no reason to act — even when test scores were low. If a child had an A in math and a test score at the 30th percentile, parents were more likely to act as if everything were fine. But when grades were low and test scores high, they responded. The change was modest, but the pattern consistent: On average, parents were willing to pay 14 percent more to fix a drop in grades than they were to fix a comparable drop in test scores.
Parents are not inattentive. But grades arrive more often — through report cards and teacher communications — and are far easier to understand than test scores. Standardized test scores come once a year, often in formats that even well-educated parents find confusing. And many parents don’t believe test scores are reliable measures of learning. When we surveyed parents about their beliefs, about 40 percent said they thought standardized tests were biased and nearly 30 percent said test scores mostly reflect family income rather than academic ability.
It is true that both grades and test scores have limitations. Grades bundle achievement, effort, behavior and teacher judgment, with no common standard across classrooms; test scores measure a narrower slice of what matters, but on a common scale. At their best, standardized tests give parents a measure of what their children have learned, whether they are learning at the expected rate and where they stand relative to other children — a measure that doesn’t depend on which teacher they have or which school they attend. State standardized tests also report whether a child has met grade-level proficiency benchmarks.
Reversing grade inflation is the most direct fix for helping parents understand how their children are doing in school, but it requires the kind of broad institutional change that moves slowly. So far, no state has taken it on. In the meantime, states and districts should resist efforts that make the problem harder to see. They should maintain rigorous proficiency standards and do more to help parents understand what the results mean. For example, states could require that standardized test results be included on report cards alongside grades, with clear explanations of what proficiency levels mean.
For parents who want to know what’s really going on: Ask your children’s teachers directly whether they are performing at grade level. If your school uses benchmark assessments like MAP, request those results. When test scores and grades tell different stories, take the test scores seriously — they may be the more honest measure of what your child knows. And if your children’s school is one where nearly every student gets an A, treat that as a warning, not a reassurance. When grades and test scores diverge, that gap is information: perhaps the most important information you will receive about your children’s education that year.
Ariel Kalil is a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. Derek Rury is an assistant professor of economics at Oregon State University.
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