Test Scores, Budget Cuts and Equity

Many of the national tests that measure student achievement have fallen victim to federal budget cuts. Will their absence make any difference?

Faithful readers of this Substack may recall that I’ve criticized the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—known informally as the Nation’s Report Card—which regularly tests a representative sample of U.S. students in reading, math, and other subjects. (See, for example, here and here.) So they might think I would be cheering the recently announced decision to cancel administrations of a number of those tests. They would be wrong, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.

But first: what exactly has been canceled? Not the biannual reading and math tests that make headlines and are mandated by Congress—or at least, not officially. As reported by Jill Barshay in the Hechinger Report, those tests are still on the schedule, but DOGE-mandated cuts to the U.S. Department of Education have cast doubt on the department’s ability to administer them, as planned, next year.

Officially, the only tests that have been scrapped are some lesser known ones in science, U.S. history, and writing, along with some state- and district-level results. In addition, a test designed to measure long-term trends, going back to the 1970s, has been consigned to the dustbin.

Members of the board that sets policy for the NAEP told Barshay they’re trying to maintain standards for a smaller number of tests, given budget constraints. Those constraints aren’t new, having previously resulted in the postponement of the writing test to 2032—a timeline that would have left a 21-year gap since its previous administration in 2011. But now, in the era of vanishing government resources, we may never see another national writing test again.

The Reading Test Is the Problem

Here’s why I’m not cheering these cuts: The test I have found fault with is the reading test, which is still (theoretically) going to be administered every two years. That test is a problem because, like all reading comprehension tests, it perpetuates the mistaken idea that you can test reading comprehension in the abstract—which leads to the equally mistaken assumption that you can teach reading comprehension in the abstract, divorced from any particular text or content.

That approach to comprehension instruction may not be the only reason NAEP reading scores have been stagnant or declining for over two decades now—and that the gap between high- and low-scorers has widened. But