Cuts to the Department of Education are hitting the highly valued Nation’s Report Card even as sirens blare on student test scores.
The 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was recently canceled, and the top official in charge of it was put on leave, leading advocates to doubt a promise from the Department of Education that NAEP would not be affected by the cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“NAEP provides the only consistent, cross-state picture of student learning; the data is vital for understanding the effectiveness of education policies and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are invested in strategies that lead to improvement in teaching and learning outcomes,” said Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.
NAEP is the most comprehensive of such U.S. educational assessments, comparing scores across states and among decades of data
While the core NAEP assessment for fourth and eighth graders has yet to be affected, other parts of the national test have already seen changes.
The NAEP exam for 17-year-olds, which only occurs every four years, was canceled for 2025.
“NAEP is a valuable resource for educators, parents, and policymakers. The cancellation of the Long-Term Trend assessment of 17-year-olds is not unprecedented, it has been cancelled several times in the past,” said Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Department of Education. “Other NAEP longitudinal assessments are continuing as normal. We will continue to support NAEP access and transparency around student data.”
And the exams that have been done have shown dismal results.
Both fourth and eighth graders in the NAEP results this year have seen further declines in reading. For those at the lowest level, scores dipped to the lowest in decades.
In math, fourth graders had a slight improvement, but still behind where they were before the pandemic, while eighth graders saw no change.
In both subjects, the gaps between the lowest-performing and highest-performing students are still growing.
“We know how important of a tool [NAEP] is, particularly as an equity measure, so we’re on the lookout for any changes that can happen, and how that’s going to affect our ability to assess how well district schools and states are providing services to the students that need them the most,” said Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy at Ed Trust.
Peggy Carr, appointed by former President Biden to be the NAEP administrator after decades at the Department of Education, has been put on administrative leave, one of scores of agency staffers who may be in DOGE’s crosshairs, though the department originally said NAEP would not be affected by the around $1 billion in cuts the agency has faced.
The results from the NAEP are highly anticipated every year as it avoids some of the critiques that state assessments of students’ face.
EdTrust sees the NAEP scores as a check on state exams.
“State tests, for example, gauge performance against states’ curriculum standards, so they’re more closely tied to what students learn in the classroom than NAEP’s measures of more generic math and reading skills,” the organization said in an evaluation.
While experts say all assessments of students need to be constantly monitored and improved, what’s happening to NAEP under the Trump administration is not transparent.
“We don’t think that all the changes just need to be as vast and as big. I think the sort of structural component of having a national assessment that allows us to evaluate is so important,” said Duncan.
Mark Schneider, former director of the Institute for Education Sciences who served under President Trump’s first administration and part way through Biden’s, told education outlet The 74 that cuts to NAEP may come in response to its growth.
“NAEP is going to take a haircut. I don’t think there’s a question about that,” said Schneider about the national exam, which costs more than $170 million. “The question is ‘How do you prioritize what it does in a harsh fiscal environment?’”
“We’ve been doing main NAEP since the 1990s. Why do we need long-term trend tests?” he added. “NAEP has grown and grown and grown, and from my perspective, it’s way too expensive.”
Other experts say that just as important as preserving solid testing is acting effectively on its results.
“I am interested in seeing an appetite for evidence when it comes to education policy decisions. I would like to see continued investment in programs like NAEP. NAEP is a critical tool for providing transparency, informing education policy decisions, and examining long-term trends in student outcomes,” Chakravarty said.
