The Cosmic Watchdog

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.”

He also said that standardized test scores aren’t just a stressful chore for students and teachers — they correlate with long-term success. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that Kane and others wrote, “a standard deviation improvement in a birth cohort’s eighth grade math achievement” on the NAEP, “was associated with an 8 percent rise in income, as well as improved educational attainment and declines in teen motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates.”