Better Use of Testing Data Could Help Students Master the Three R’s

Better Use of Testing Data Could Help Students Master the Three R's

NAEP scores can give states a picture of what's driving student outcomes in reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic.

"We clearly have a consistent set of data from NAEP where we need to work together. We need every good idea on the table," says Katy Anthes, creator and director of the FORWARD initiative at the Public Education and Business Coalition. (NCSL photo)

Test scores show that U.S. students have yet to recover from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic-but that's not where the problem began.

"As we seek to understand what's going on and what needs to change, we can't just be focused on getting back to normal levels prior to the pandemic," Martin West, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, told a session on bipartisan solutions to improve student outcomes held at the 2025 NCSL Legislative Summit in Boston. "Things were already headed in the wrong direction at that time."

"As we seek to understand what's going on and what needs to change, we can't just be focused on getting back to normal levels prior to the pandemic."

-Martin West, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board

The independent, bipartisan board sets policy and develops the framework and test specifications for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The NAEP assesses students in fourth, eighth and 12th grade across the nation in a variety of subject areas, often math, reading, science and civics. Results from the federally mandated testing, which began in 1969, are released annually as the Nation's Report Card.

West, who is also a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, says that every state's NAEP achievement levels were lower in 2024 than in 2019 in at least one of the four tested grades and subjects. But looking back further reveals a "steady decline in students' reading achievement starting in 2015 in grade four and starting a bit earlier in 2013 in grade eight."

Bright Spots

West says some states have managed to buck recent trends: Alabama fourth graders, for example, avoided the pandemic backslide in math and made substantial gains from 2022 to 2024.

"Louisiana showed much the same pattern in fourth grade reading," he says. "And Louisiana's success in fourth grade reading really is falling in the footsteps of its neighbor, Mississippi, where people have recently come to talk about the 'Mississippi Miracle.' It was traditionally the very lowest-performing state in early-grade literacy in the nation, and it has completely flipped that narrative over the past decade-not just meeting but surpassing the national average and demonstrating impressive resilience through the pandemic era."

Maryland Del. Jared Solomon, another member of the National Assessment Governing Board and a former high school social studies teacher, says his state created a blueprint for the future of education in the state when "we realized we weren't doing as well compared to our neighbors and our peers as we thought we were."

"We brought stakeholders together, and then more recently, as we've begun to implement the blueprint, we didn't see our literacy scores where we really wanted to be," he says. "And so, we have embarked on sort of an all-hands-on-deck approach, nonpartisan across the state, to really dig into what aren't we doing in reading and how do we fix it?"

He adds, "We saw some gains particularly as compared to our peers in the last set of data. But that's really driving the conversation in reading, and we're also getting to put together a new state comprehensive plan around math instruction, as well."

Increasing State Standards

Tennessee Rep. Mark White, another NAEP governing board member and a former elementary school teacher and principal, says he and his colleagues "got busy based upon the NAEP data, and we increased our standards and tested to those standards." Their efforts paid off. "Due to NAEP data, we were recognized as the fastest-improving state in the nation," he says.

West, the NAEP governing board's vice chair, cautions against piecemeal approaches to try to duplicate the results of a state that appears to be doing well.

"There's a temptation to find a high-performing state that's making a lot of progress, like Mississippi, to go look at what they're doing, find the thing that sounds the best to you, and then say, 'That must be what's responsible, and we'll just go do that,'" he says.

A better approach: Use NAEP data to begin a detailed and rigorous analysis of what really has been driving trends and achievement, West says.

He cautions, however, there can be frustrations, even when using data. Post-pandemic, Massachusetts remains a top-performing state in fourth and eighth grade math and reading. "It's hard when that's the case," he says, "to convince your department of education or the governor's office to not make that the first sentence of the press release, which sometimes makes it hard to call attention to the fact that things have very much not been headed in the right direction over the past decade for Massachusetts. And that the only reason we're still at the top is because things have not been going in the right direction among other high-performing states, as well. It's really some traditionally lower-performing states that have demonstrated rapid progress."

Working Across the Aisle

Bipartisanship is key to making effective education policy, says Solomon, who co-wrote an article with White about working across the aisle to help students excel. And while data plays a critical role, so does establishing a common purpose.

"Everybody wants their kids to be successful. Everybody wants their kids to be able to read, to enjoy going to school, to be curious," he says. "Grounding the work that we do in the real-world impact on children, especially if your colleague is a parent themselves or has a niece or a nephew or grandkids, I think is a really easy way to connect and start the conversation about how we can make things better."

White says with the federal government possibly pushing more responsibility for education to the states, assessments-and bipartisan agreement-are more important than ever.

"We just need to learn to be humble and work with each other because, we've become really too partisan," he says. "And I understand positions that we take as a nation, but if we don't listen to each other and try to come together, then nothing works."

Katy Anthes, creator and director of the FORWARD initiative at the Public Education and Business Coalition, worries that legislators face increasing pressure to toe the party line rather than assess ideas on their merits.

"We have to make bipartisanship cool again. We have to make compromise cool again," she says. "We clearly have a consistent set of data from NAEP where we need to work together. We need every good idea on the table. We need to assess every idea for its merits. We need to try it out, test it, prototype it, see what works-and learn from each other."

Lisa Ryckman is NCSL's associate director of communications.