Unfortunately, Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, agrees with President Trump’s executive command that the Ministry of Education should go away, but has not stopped there. As a consequence of the enormous work, it cuts that McMahon has so far adopted, it has hit the federal government’s ability to gather statistics on students ‘achievements, effective teaching practices and students’ education. The Institute of Education, which collects this data, “now has less than 20 federal employees, from more than 175 at the beginning of Trump’s second administration”, according to Jill Barshay at the Hechinger report.
Even NAEP, which is considered the golden model of national tests and whose data McMahon reported in its testimony before Congress showing how bad American students are fading, may be at risk. The Ministry of Education “was abruptly canceled” a long -term 17 -year -old tendency test just a week after saying that “the recent round of cuts will not affect the national evaluation of educational progress,” said Linda Jacobson of 74.
Standard trials are not perfect and I am nice to the argument that it can block the autonomy of teachers in the classroom. But there is evidence that without standard tests, parents have little awareness of their children’s deficits, partly due to grade inflation – in recent decades, test scores have declined while grades have increased. This issue, which preceded the pandemic, is known as the “honesty gap”.
In 2023, Tom Kane and Sean Reardon, Harvard training teachers and Stanford respectively, wrote an essay based on their research called “parents do not understand how far their children are at school”. I called Kane to see if since he wrote this piece, anything that changed with the success of students or parental knowledge. Kane mentioned the honesty gap and told me when we talked late last month, “very few parents have detailed knowledge of the point where their child is in the program, but even fewer know how they compare to where children would be in 2019.”
He also said that standard test scores are not just a stressful job for students and teachers-are being successful with long-term success. According to a work document of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which Kane and others wrote: “A typical improvement of divergence in an eighth grade of the birth group” in NAEP, “was associated with an increase of income by 8 %,
