Standardized tests convey crucial data

According to the latest Education Scorecard report — produced by scholars from Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth — the troubling decline in student performance during the COVID-era shutdown wasn’t truly a decisive break with the recent past.

“The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. “The learning recession started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives.”

The Education Scorecard researchers don’t play partisan games or ideological gotcha. They criticize policymakers of both parties for taking their eyes off the ball, and spotlight school districts in both “red” and “blue” jurisdictions that have bucked the negative trend. Are “science of reading” reforms, such as those enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly, likely to boost proficiency? Yes, they conclude — but there’s nothing automatic about the effects of phonics-based programs. States such as Mississippi and Louisiana posted healthy gains after implementing the reforms. Others have yet to see much of a ripple in student performance.

I have repeatedly pointed to our state’s experience as an illustration of wayward policymaking. Using National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores adjusted for student background, I noted that as recently as 2019, North Carolina schools ranked seventh in the country in value-added performance. In 2024, we were 32nd. I struggle to see how former Gov. Roy Cooper’s disastrous closure of our public schools cannot be correctly assessed as the primary explanation.

But those studies compare North Carolina students to those in other places. They don’t reflect absolute performance. In other words, if most jurisdictions were trending downward (again, adjusting for student background) before COVID, then additional causal factors must be at play.

I think the Education Scorecard team makes a solid case that, somewhat as a backlash to the “No Child Left Behind” era, states and localities began to downplay the importance of test scores rather than using them to drive change.

“From the early 1990s through 2013,” said Stanford Professor Sean Reardon, “public elementary and middle school students’ math and reading skills improved dramatically — by more than two grade levels in math, for example — and racial/ethnic achievement disparities narrowed. That shows that we can improve our public schools and equalize educational opportunity. But we haven’t been doing much of that for the last decade.”

Here in North Carolina, this isn’t the partisan issue you might assume it is. I’ve had conversations with Republicans and Democrats who believe our kids are taking too many standardized tests, and that the results are too consequential for students, teachers, and schools. I also know Republican and Democratic policymakers who believe, as I do, that test-based accountability was a good idea, drove much of the gains of the 1990s and 2000s, and ought to be retained and strengthened.

We can do so while also recognizing some of the limitations of the current model. In assessing teachers and schools, for example, it makes little sense to focus primarily on raw scores. Educators and programs ought to be evaluated according to the value they add to the process, after adjusting for family background and other circumstances that strongly correlate with test scores.

Still, when students graduate from high school and head off to enroll, enlist, or get a job, what will determine their prospects? How well they read, write, compute, compete, collaborate, and solve problems — not whether their test scores exceeded a baseline forecast. Properly designed, administered, and interpreted tests can supply both sets of data. We can and should present both sets of data to educators, parents, and taxpayers without turning the matter into a political food fight.

As of 2024, North Carolina’s eighth-graders outperformed the national average on NAEP math exams and matched it in reading. Neither performance was good enough, since the national average is itself unimpressive. Too many children are, in fact, being left behind.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.