Restoring Transparency and Accountability in K-12 Schools

This year, the next chapter in the battle to reform underperforming K-12 schools began. State lawmakers across the United States began considering ways to ensure that all children receive a high-quality K-12 education. The most popular and promising approach gives parents access to K-12 education savings accounts (ESA). These accounts, drawn from the state share of K-12 funding, enable parents to take direct control of a share of their child’s public education dollars to pay for tuition, tutoring, and other education expenses. As of June, eleven states now have ESA programs, including programs that will become universal or nearly universal over time.

However, this revolution in American K-12 education is occurring when parents and the public have less information about school performance than they have had in decades. While federal law requires states to publish information about students’ performance — including school report cards — many states do not publish testing and other school performance data in a timely manner. In December, a frustrated Congress gave the Department of Education (ED) six months to explain how and why states failed to comply with federal reporting requirements and ED’s suggested remedies to improve the relevant data.

This article analyzes current information about American students’ academic achievement, including recent learning losses following the pandemic. It reviews broad trends in federal policy regarding state testing programs and recent changes. The article analyzes current state practices for testing students and reporting information to parents and the public. I conclude with recommendations for improving transparency about students’ academic achievement — including through timely and useful public reporting — by adopting progress-monitoring testing systems and giving parents new options to track their students’ progress.

Learning losses following school closures

The 2022 National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed the nationwide cost of the unnecessary and prolonged pandemic-related school closures. The NAEP long-term trend assessment released in September revealed that the average scores of nine-year-olds declined by seven points in mathematics and five points in reading. These scores represent the first-ever decline in math and the largest decrease in reading in more than three decades. These results confirmed warnings that lengthy school closures would cause significant learning losses, and disadvantaged children suffered the most. In fact, the long-term assessment found that low-performing students’ reading and math scores declined more than their higher-performing peers. McKinsey & Company analyzed the learning losses apparent in NAEP and reported that American students’ average scores indicate that they “were on average about 15 to 24 weeks behind in math and nine weeks behind in reading compared with 2019, or a quarter to half a school year behind.”

In October, NAEP released additional data from its 4th and 8th grade reading and math assessments. These data provide additional insight about American students’ performance, including state-by-state data. The assessment confirmed nationwide declines in students’ academic achievement and that an alarming percentage of American children lack even basic reading or math skills.

Only 20 percent of children eligible for the National School Lunch Program — a reliable marker for students living in low-income households — scored proficient or advanced in either subject. More than half of low-income 4th graders scored below basic in reading. A majority of low-income 8th graders scored below basic in math.

Economically disadvantaged students’ achievement levels on the NAEP

For the American public and policymakers, the NAEP test provides a useful barometer of the condition of American education. Administered periodically for over fifty years, NAEP is “the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation’s students know and can do in subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing.” The assessment can reveal the broad impact of major policy failures, such as prolonged school closures.

But for American parents, teachers, and others concerned about specific students’ academic well-being, the NAEP provides only limited transparency. The NAEP exam is administered to a sample of students and participating children do not receive their scores. Parents must look to other measures like state tests and individual report cards to assess their children’s academic progress.

Recent national policy changes in K-12 student testing and reporting

Understanding the role of testing in K-12 education requires a brief recent history of federal education policy and school reform.

For decades, policymakers and the public have used state tests, school report cards, and similar measures to provide a more detailed understanding about students’ academic achievement at the institutional level. At the beginning of this century, accountability through testing was the primary focus of American education reform efforts, most notably through the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The NCLB required states to test students annually, break out students’ academic achievement by subgroups, and demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” in increasing students’ proficiency to receive federal K-12 education funds. While NCLB had some unintended consequences, it embodied the national strategy of focusing on school testing as a measure of accountability to improve students’ learning opportunities.

In the years since, several significant events and trends have eroded what was once a national bipartisan consensus in favor of testing and accountability. (For those interested in a detailed history of the school reform and accountability movements, see Rick Hess and Checker Finn’s recent National Affairs article “The End of School Reform?”)

Political support for federally mandated testing and accountability mechanisms changed after No Child Left Behind. Later, the Obama administration’s attempt to nationalize state education standards through the Common Core and Race to the Top initiatives further split the old consensus for accountability through testing. These programs involved establishing and promoting national education standards for math and reading, which a majority of states had adopted by 2010. But the bipartisan push for centralization also spurred a bipartisan opposition. Opponents on the right fretted about excessive federal pressure on states, while opponents on the left questioned the focus on testing and teacher evaluations.

The Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless summarized the disappointing outcome of the Common Core initiative: “A decade later, scant evidence exists that Common Core produced any significant benefit. One federally funded evaluation actually estimates that the standards had a negative effect on student achievement in both reading and math.”

In 2015, President Obama signed the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law, which maintained the basic framework of federal K-12 education policy, including the requirements for states to conduct annual testing and report information to parents. But the law removed the strict accountability mechanism of No Child Left Behind.

ESSA also established a pilot project for up to seven states to participate in an Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA). The project’s purpose was to allow states to replace their existing testing systems with innovative ones that would be more useful for students and schools.

Congress defined the innovative assessments as:

(1) competency-based assessments, instructionally embedded assessments, interim assessments, cumulative year-end assessments, or performance-based assessments that combine into an annual summative determination for a student, which may be administered through computer adaptive assessments; and ‘‘(2) assessments that validate when students are ready to demonstrate mastery or proficiency and allow for differentiated student support based on individual learning needs.

To date, four states — Georgia, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and North Carolina — have been approved to participate in the pilot project.

ESSA prompted most state testing systems into alignment in just a few years. It also spurred a national movement for states to focus on measuring students’ growth. As of 2019, 48 states and Washington, D.C. had updated assessment systems to track and measure individual students’ growth, which provides a more meaningful evaluation of how well schools are promoting children’s learning. Growth model assessments provide more insight into school quality. Rather than simply measuring if students were proficient, growth model assessments track students’ progress over time. According to a 2019 review by Georgetown University, many states had adopted the ACT or SAT as the high school assessment required under federal law; most had transitioned to computer-based testing; and states focused less on comparing their students with those in other states. As Lynn Olson wrote in that report:

“At the same time, states have shown growing interest in designing assessment systems that better reflect and support the daily work of students and teachers in classrooms. These include faster turnaround of test results, as well as greater use of end-of-unit tests, performance-based tasks that ask students to apply what they know and can do, and tests that are more closely linked to the curriculum. Such efforts could provide better ongoing information about student progress, while giving teachers more guidance on how to adjust instruction. But to date, except for in a handful of states, there has been more talk than action.”

The lingering administrative effects of COVID-19

Public schools across the United States closed when the government declared the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, ED Secretary Betsy DeVos waived the testing requirements of the ESSA law for the 2019–20 school year. In February 2021, the Biden Administration’s ED notified state education officials that they were required to test students under ESSA for the 2020–21 school year; however, ED granted broad flexibility to implement modified tests.

In 2023, the ED published an evaluation of IADA which reviewed its implementation through the 2020–21 school year. ED reported that each of the innovative assessment models “were working to include interim assessments to provide more frequent information about student progress and cover less, and often more targeted, content per test to better inform instruction.” ED also found that pandemic disruptions had hindered states’ ability to implement the innovative assessment models as of 2021. Nevertheless, this pilot project aimed to improve the value of federally mandated assessments could inform future federal legislative reforms.

States restarted regular testing, but public reporting has been slow and often opaque

In 2022, states and school districts released the results of standardized testing during the 2021–22 school year, though some states delayed the release of their results well into the fall of 2022.

In the fall of 2022, I reviewed states’ testing windows and publicly reported assessment results. More than half of the states released test results more than 100 days after the state testing window had closed. Such a delay seems excessive given that most testing is computer-based. California, for example, delayed the release of its state tests months into the following school year, as the Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian wrote, denying parents and educators “the necessary data to determine what support and remediation [students] need.” New York delayed releasing its results until November of the next school year. By that month, several states had not yet released their test scores.

An analysis by Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan think tank, found that states were not complying with federal testing and data transparency rules to make information accessible to the public. The report noted:

“As of December 20, 2022, [46 states and the District of Columbia] reported their 2022 assessment results in the form of a table or spreadsheet. These raw spreadsheets contain massive amounts of data that take up a great amount of computing capacity and are often poorly organized, making it difficult for parents and other stakeholders to make sense of.”

The lack of timely and transparent public reporting about state test results denies parents and watchdog groups the opportunity to analyze this information to understand how public schools perform. Moreover, delaying the release of this data prevents third-party services, such as academic centers like Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project and nonprofit organizations like Great Schools, the ability to update their analysis. (These services provide parents and other people with information about public schools’ performance and are commonly analyzed when people are deciding where to live, for example.)

Congressional appropriators have focused attention on states’ lack of compliance with federal law

In the FY2023 Omnibus appropriations package, Congressional appropriators focused attention on ED’s responsibility to require states to comply with federal law, including publishing state report cards. In the statement accompanying the division of the bill that included ED funding, the Congressional appropriators included the following reporting requirement:

State and local Report Cards–The Department is directed to, not later than 6 months after enactment of this Act, submit to the Committees and to the Committees of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the Senate and of Education and Labor of the House of Representatives a report outlining actions taken to bring States into compliance with all ESEA annual reporting requirements, particularly for those States that have yet to come into full compliance with such requirements; common implementation obstacles facing States in complying with such requirements; and efforts to improve the accessibility, quality, and utility of this information.

This reporting requirement reflects bipartisan interest and concern in states’ failure to comply with federal law. It also demonstrates the broad support for providing transparency to parents and the public about school performance. During the 118th Congress, authorizing committees should also conduct oversight of states’ compliance with ESSA, including hearings to examine whether states are providing timely and useful information to parents and the public.

Recommendations

State and federal policymakers have a responsibility to address the widespread learning losses suffered by American children during the pandemic. Part of this effort should include providing timely information about students’ academic achievement and progress. Such information will allow parents to make the best decisions for their children. This ability is particularly important in the growing number of states that give parents more options to improve their children’s education.

Establishing and maintaining timely state tests that measure students’ progress provides information to teachers who can identify ways to help students recover and advance academically. This should also provide parents and students with access to independent diagnostic tests and tutoring to support children’s education. In addition, federal and state officials should press state education agencies to improve the transparency of their management and release of the results of state assessments.

1. At a minimum, Congress and the Department of Education should require state education agencies to maintain state K-12 testing, as required by federal law, and to provide timely and transparent public reporting to ensure that parents, teachers, school leaders, and the public have actionable information about students’ and schools’ performance. Congress could conduct fact-finding oversight, require watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office to conduct reviews, and hold hearings to examine how states are complying with the Every Student Succeeds Act, including analyzing potential delays in state assessment results being released to parents and the public. Such fact-finding should include questioning third-party services that provide transparency about schools’ academic performance to better understand how state testing data should be made available to improve nongovernmental efforts to establish transparency. Further, ED should provide guidance to state education agencies and require states to publish test scores in a timely and accessible manner. For example, ED could require states to publish test scores one month prior to the start of the school year. In addition, states should publish school report cards in user-friendly formats.
2. Congress and ED should review the outcomes of the federal Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority pilot project to better understand how giving states more flexibility to innovate testing systems could improve academic transparency. The 2023 ED review of IADA indicates that states attempted to conduct periodic assessments and provided more timely feedback to help monitor students’ progress throughout the school year. Federal policymakers should further study these models to determine their efficacy and, if useful, to provide this flexibility to all states.
3. State policymakers should adopt “progress monitoring” K-12 assessments to provide timely and actionable information to students, parents, and teachers. Rather than relying on state tests that give infrequent snapshots of student learning, states should use periodic testing or progress monitoring to provide more timely information to parents and teachers about students’ progress. Such information can hasten academic interventions for students who are not making adequate progress. This can also inform classroom and outside-of-school instruction. For example, in 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law replacing Florida’s one standardized test with a system of progress monitoring that will test students three times during the school year.
4. States should provide options to parents to access independent testing and tutoring for their children to monitor students’ recovery and academic progress. Since current state assessments provide parents with limited and often delayed information about their students’ academic performance, parents often lack useful information about their children’s progress in the classroom. However, parents can access relatively inexpensive services that provide more actionable information about student progress, as the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke explained in an essay recommending an appraisal market for K-12 education. Policymakers could offer parents access to online testing services or provide access to funding to purchase independent testing services to monitor their children’s progress. States and local education agencies have significant resources available through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds that Congress provided during the pandemic. Those funds were intended to help schools reopen and assist student recovery from the effects of school closures. In the short run, spending some of these emergency funds on improving testing systems and providing parents with access to independent measures of students’ academic progress would be appropriate. In addition, parents should be permitted to use funds to test their children for academic achievement or mastery for postsecondary education, such as the SAT, ACT, Classic Learning Test, as well as the Advanced Placement and CLEP exams.

Conclusion

The learning losses that occurred during the pandemic pose a long-term risk to a generation of American children and society as a whole. In 2023, real transparency about students’ and public schools’ performance is necessary to address learning losses and ensure that American students have access to high-quality learning opportunities. Congress and state policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that states are complying with federal law to monitor student performance.

In addition, as more states continue to provide parents with new options to direct how their children learn — including education savings accounts and other choice mechanisms — policymakers should modernize the way that testing measures students’ performance and ensure that the K-12 education system is accountable to the public. Many state assessment systems and reporting procedures do not provide parents with timely and transparent information about their children’s academic progress and their school’s performance. To help children recover from the learning losses caused by prolonged school closures and provide all families with greater transparency about students’ progress, federal and state policymakers should reform current testing and reporting practices to give parents and teachers actionable information about how students learn.