Parents Don’t Know It but K-12 Students Are Falling Into ‘the Honesty Gap’
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 said in the spring of 2020 about the 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 the huge 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” a long-term trend test of 17-year-olds 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.
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.”
Continue reading at nytimes.com