Unfortunately, Education Secretary Linda McMahon agrees to President Trump's executive order that the Department of Education should be gone, but she hasn't stopped there. As a result of the large work McMahon has enacted so far, she has hampered the federal government's ability to gather statistics on student achievement, effective educational practices, and student literacy. According to Jill Barshay of the Hekinger Report, the Education Institute that collects this data “currently has fewer than 20 federal employees remaining from over 175 at the time of the start of the second Trump administration.”
Even the NAEP is considered the gold standard for national exams, and that data McMahon cited in her testimony before Congress to show how poor American students are. The Ministry of Education “suddenly cancelled” the national ratings for Grade 12, just a week after saying “recent rounds of cuts have no impact on national ratings of education advancement.”
I sympathize with the argument that standardized tests are not perfect and can interfere with the autonomy of classroom teachers. However, there is evidence that without standardized tests, parents have little awareness of their children's deficits. This is due to grade inflation, and test scores have been declining over the past decades while performance has improved. This issue, which preceded the pandemic, is known as the “integrity gap.”
In 2023, Tom Kane and Sean Reardon, professors of education at Harvard and Stanford, respectively, wrote guest essays based on the study that “parents don't understand that their children are in school.” I called Kane to see if there had been anything that had changed since he wrote the work and the knowledge of his parents. Kane mentioned the gap in integrity and told me when I spoke later last month.
He also said standardized test scores are correlated with long-term success, rather than stressful chores for students and teachers. According to a working paper by the National Economic Research Agency, written by Kane and others, “standard deviation improvements in mathematics achievement for 8th graders in the birth cohort” on NAEP was associated with an “8% increase in income and an improved educational achievement and reduction in teenage motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates.”
