When Trump returned to office, he appointed Linda McMahon as the Secretary of Education. Her objective: to find herself out of a job in four years and gut the Department of Education from the inside. In his executive order, Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities, Trump cites the deficient scores of 8th graders in reading and writing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as evidence that “the Federal education bureaucracy is not working.” His alternative, return autonomy to States and local communities and empower parents to pick alternative education options like private schools and charter schools for their children.
This policy, often referred to as school choice, has continued to be the crux of Trump’s education policy. Every year from 2017 to 2019 Trump signed a Presidential Proclamation affirming the importance of school choice and continues to praise school choice bills at the state and local level. While there are certainly inefficiencies in our current educational systems, Trump’s actions are more akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater than trimming fat. His cuts threaten to not only derail the only tool researchers and policymakers have for molding and analyzing the effectiveness of different policies but also weaken his own platform by removing the only assessment to compare student performance across the nation.
Often called the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is a critical and longstanding program used to assess the current state of education in the United States. The Hawkins-Stafford Elementary and Secondary School Improvement Amendments of 1988 charged NAEP with carrying out a periodic exam to report on the achievement of students in the United States, creating NAEP as we know it today. The assessment has two parts, the main assessment conducted yearly for 4th, 8th and 12th graders, and a long-term assessment for those aged 9, 13 and 17. Unlike the main assessment, the curriculum of the long-term assessment is stable in order to compare different generations of students. Further, the governing body of NAEP was charged with developing standards and achievement goals for the states.
Policymakers historically used the data provided by NAEP to actively improve and assess education policy. In Mississippi, where NAEP scores were traditionally far below the national average, legislators revamped state standards to match the standards of NAEP and by 2019, Mississippi was at the national average for 4th grade reading and writing. In North Carolina, 2005 NAEP results revealed that 8th graders were scoring below the national average. In response, the state enlisted 200 literacy coaches to middle schools all across the state.
Trump cuts have dulled what was once the sharpest weapon in policymakers’ educational arsenal. Since the start of his second term, the Trump administration cut around $1 billion from the Department of Education’s funding. Despite promising to insulate NAEP from those cuts, Trump cancelled the 2015 NAEP for 17-year-olds and has since placed the former Biden-appointed commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversees the NAEP, on paid leave before the completion of her term. His cuts on the Department of Education’s headcount left only three employees at the National Center for Education Statistics to run the NAEP.
These moves are some of many that Trump has done to weaken an already diminished data pool of students. During his last term, Trump repealed guidance and oversight guardrails of NAEP exams under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. One such action was the removal of the requirement that schools must include 95% of their student body population in their annual assessments and reports. He had also canceled previous exams. The last two previous exams, 2016 and 2020, were cancelled; the latter due to COVID-19 and the former citing budget constraints. With the cancellation of this year’s exam, NAEP is facing a 13-year drought of long-term trends data. Such a drought can have a cascading effect for policymakers who continue to use this data to guide policymaking. The longer these holdouts continue, the less effective NAEP can be as a trends assessment, and the weaker our education policy becomes because of it.
This goes for Trump too. NAEP could easily become one of Trump’s best branding and marketing weapons. The exam itself is created through a rigorous research and multi-year approval process by the NCES and National Assessment Governing Body, meaning that unlike other exams where patterns can be learned, and cheated, the NAEP is one of the truly few fair metrics at which to compare, public, charter, and private school students. And in comparison, charter and private schools perform well above the national average on NAEP testing. While Trump cited lower test scores for students across the nation, schools in D.C. (which boasts the highest share of charter and private school attendance in the nation at 55% of students) show that reading and writing scores for their children actually improved. Further, private catholic schools vastly outperformed their public school counterparts in both reading and math. Rather than cutting the program, Trump should be parading the results through the streets as a testament to his policy goals. Yet, instead of using the data to garner support, he decides to weaken one of the only mechanisms to track the achievements of both private and public schools. Reducing NAEP, in the long term, will cripple Trump’s push for more school choice. In its wake will be the bare bones of a once strong federal institution.