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NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not
In this era of extreme partisan divide, there’s very little that unites conservatives and liberals. But both sides have long backed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is also called the Nation’s Report Card. Now even this test, touted as the “gold standard” among all assessments, is in jeopardy. Mass layoffs, funding disruptions, […] The post NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
In this era of extreme partisan divide, there’s very little that unites conservatives and liberals. But both sides have long backed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is also called the Nation’s Report Card.
Now even this test, touted as the “gold standard” among all assessments, is in jeopardy.
Mass layoffs, funding disruptions, and threats of future steep cuts are worrying those who are aware of the inner workings of the NAEP test. “It’s a very delicate instrument,” said conservative education commentator Chester Finn, who formerly chaired the governing board that oversees the assessment. “Risky things are happening. It’s going from bad to worse.”
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Influential state policymakers are also sounding the alarm. “I am worried that NAEP is not going to happen,” said Maryland Superintendent of Schools Carey Wright, who ran Mississippi’s education department until 2022 and served on the governing board of the national assessment. “I’m concerned the congressional mandate will be ignored.”
Congress requires that NAEP assess the reading and math abilities of fourth and eighth graders every two years, with the next administration scheduled to take place in the first quarter of 2026. It is the only nationally representative assessment of what American students know. And because of its design, it is the only way to measure academic achievement of students over time, between rich and poor, and across states.
Without NAEP, we would not be so painfully aware of pandemic learning losses and how children cannot read and multiply nearly as well as they could in 2019, nor would other states be looking to copy the Mississippi miracle in which the state skyrocketed from 49th in the nation in fourth-grade reading to ninth in just a decade. Indeed, the disastrous 2024 NAEP scores are President Donald Trump’s main justification for closing the Education Department in his March 2025 executive order. Without NAEP, there would be no evidence of failure.
Administering a test might seem like a simple task from the outside. After all, teachers create and give tests every day. But under the hood, NAEP is quite complicated with a series of actions that have to happen by different deadlines to create the questions; review them for validity, reliability and bias; select the students who will be tested and administer the exam to them, and finally to analyze results with statistical precision. Minor delays and cuts can have big consequences. “It’s like Jenga,” said one former education official. “If you take out something, the whole thing can crumble.”
The threat to NAEP began with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in February. DOGE’s cost cutters slashed research and statistics contracts at the Education Department, but a spokeswoman emphasized that no cuts had been made to contracts for NAEP. While it seemed that NAEP had been spared, there were already warning signs. Data that the test relies on was cancelled. Without data on student demographics and poverty, statisticians would be unable to create nationally representative samples of students to take the NAEP test.
Then, behind the scenes, the Education Department began to chip away at NAEP directly.
Rigorous external analysis scrapped
In February, an expert panel that studies the validity of the NAEP exam was told to stop working because funding had been cut off by the Education Department, according to panel members. This panel maintains the rigorous quality of the exam by studying whether the questions on the tests are measuring the skills we care about and if the scores can be trusted. Jack Buckley, a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, chaired this NAEP validity studies panel and said it had been meeting weekly until mid-February.
Non-core NAEP tests under threat
NAEP comprises a large basket of tests beyond the main tests in math and reading for fourth and eighth graders, which began in the early 1990s. There are also older NAEP tests that date back to 1969, which have been renamed “long-term trend” tests. Days after the DOGE contract cuts, the Education Department scrapped the long-term trend NAEP for 17-year-olds, which had been scheduled to be administered this year. The law specifies that NAEP’s long-term trend assessments must continue for students aged 9, 13 and 17 but does not specify how frequently. Some state education officials and researchers worried that the cancellation would lead to the elimination of other NAEP tests in history, civics and science, which are not required by Congress. “These things are all important for a well-rounded education,” said one state education official, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
Funding pauses for administering and writing the exam
Outside contractors perform most of the work to create and administer the exam. That’s why it was alarming in late winter when state education officials heard that funding was halted for the contract with Westat, a private data collection firm, to select the representative sample of students who take the test and then to administer it in schools. That funding resumed a couple weeks later in March, according to former Education Department officials. Westat denied that there was any pause in the funding, and says the work is still funded through June. But the rumors alarmed state officials. As of last week, Maryland officials were not informed that this work had resumed and thought it was still on hold. “There’s a lot of confusion,” said an assessment administrator in another state.
Funding and work also temporarily stopped on the digital platform that students use to take the exam and teachers and school administrators use to fill out survey questionnaires, according to four people with knowledge of the situation who did not want to be identified because they feared repercussions. Like all software, it needs constant maintenance, upgrades and security patches. But the timing was particularly worrisome as the digital test will be administered differently in 2026. Instead of NAEP bringing devices to the schools, preloaded with the testing software, students will be taking the test on school computers. Extra work must be completed to make sure schools can log in without glitches.
The contractor building this platform, ETS, gave DOGE a demonstration of its features last week. But according to former education officials, DOGE staffers are seeking additional places to cut costs and were less than impressed.
Related: Former Trump commissioner blasts DOGE education data cuts
The digital platform is also needed to complete behind-the-scenes paperwork for states to participate in the 2026 assessment. Those steps are supposed to be completed in May. As it stands now, funding for the digital platform runs out again in June.
The Education Department did not respond to inquiries to explain its plan for NAEP and the reason for the funding cuts. According to former education officials, the cuts are partly related to the budget battles in Washington that left the Education Department with only limited funding through mid-March, when a shutdown was looming. Once Congress funded the government through Sept. 30, fresh funds became available, but vendors didn’t receive the money right away. It’s unclear if these delays were intentional and a tactic to pressure vendors to make cost concessions or a result of the mass firings at the Education Department in March that left insufficient staff to process the new funding.
State coordinator uncertainty
While test administration and technology was suspended, funding for the NAEP state coordinators threatened to run out at the end of March. State education officials were anxious about losing these critical jobs, which coordinate testing in schools across their states and handle data sharing agreements with Washington. “We were sweating bullets,” said one education official in a Republican-controlled state who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. The official would have had to lay off this vital staffer. Funds finally came through on March 27, but the budget had been reduced: state coordinators will no longer meet for data workshops to help them understand and explain the results to education officials and the public.
While those state jobs were saved, funding ran out on March 31 for an even more critical task: the creation of the NAEP exams, according to four people who had direct knowledge of this paused contract. That “content development” work is carried out by ETS, and the nonprofit testing organization told its employees who oversee the writing and review of NAEP test questions to take a leave until funding resumes. Questions still need to be packaged into 30-minute sections for the 2026 NAEP tests, and fresh questions need to be written and field tested for future exams on science and 12th grade math and reading.
Budget cuts on the horizon
More drastic budget cuts loom. DOGE is actively seeking to slash the size of all the Education Department contracts that it did not terminate in February. There are roughly 10 major contracts for NAEP and all of the contractors are being asked to propose ways to cut costs. DOGE is aggressively negotiating with vendors, according to former Education Department employees. Vendors have submitted and resubmitted cost-cutting proposals, but, so far, DOGE staffers are not satisfied.
Within the Education Department bureaucracy, NAEP is housed within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which handles research and statistics. Former IES director Mark Schneider, who is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said he had heard that DOGE initially sought a 75 percent cut, and then 50 percent cut to the contracts for NAEP, which costs more than $190 million a year. DOGE has questioned why the federal government needs to create an expensive, custom-tailored test and why it cannot replace it with a commercial “off the shelf” exam from another company, several former Education Department employees said. Testing experts told me that no high-quality commercial exam exists.
More importantly, a new test would make it impossible to compare future results with past scores. If scores go up, it could be because the new test is easier, not because student achievement improved.
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To be sure, $190 million a year for a test is a lot of money. And everyone I talked with said that the process could be more efficient. A 2022 report from the National Academy of Sciences suggested that efficiencies and updated technology could reduce costs, while maintaining rigorous quality standards. But it would be impossible to preserve the quality if DOGE gets its way with a sudden 50 percent cost reduction, Wright said.
Oversight
After the mass firings of federal employees at the Education Department in March, just two people who were involved with NAEP remained. Only one of them has experience managing contracts with outside vendors. Before the mass firings, Education Department employees would check in with their vendors daily and spend hours in meetings with them every week, helping to make decisions when complications came up, such as not being able to recruit enough students for field testing new questions. Now, the sole remaining contract overseer is responsible for not just NAEP but all of the contracts for statistical collections. She has no more than 10 minutes a week for each vendor, former education employees said. “When you don’t have these bodies, you can run into errors,” said Wright. “You need to monitor this work day in and day out.”
Not everyone is worried. Erika Donalds is a close ally of Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Donalds runs the Center for Education Opportunity at the right-wing think tank, American First Policy Institute. She expressed confidence that McMahon would preserve NAEP, which Donalds characterized as “valuable.”
“I don’t have the same level of heartburn right now,” said Donalds. “I have confidence in the team and in their understanding of the importance of the continuity of information.”
Lobbying behind the scenes
Anxiety about NAEP was discussed at an April 2 webinar by the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit that advises states on their annual tests. According to Juan D’Brot, a senior associate at the center, many state education chiefs and their staff were in Washington in March for the legislative conference of Council of Chief State School Officers. “From what we learned, many advocated for both the role of NAEP and the importance of credible, high-stakes assessments directly to the Department of Education,” he wrote in the webinar chat.
Related: DOGE’s death blow to education studies
Other supporters of the test are making their case in the media. William Bennett, education secretary under former President Ronald Reagan, penned an open letter along with conservative commentator Chester Finn in The 74, urging McMahon to preserve NAEP, calling it “the single most important activity of the department.” Then Bennett teamed up with Lamar Alexander, the education secretary under former President George H.W. Bush, with an opinion piece on the Fox News website that said NAEP was chief among the three most important functions at the Education Department that should be preserved. David Winston, a Republican consultant who worked for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, wrote a piece in Roll Call, headlined “We must protect NAEP.”
It’s unclear if anyone in the Education Department is listening.
Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the future of NAEP was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
The post NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
