Trump and his allies are selling a story of dismal student performance dating back decades. Don't buy it.

What's really going on with student achievement? And why do pols and pundits keep getting the story so wrong?

Did you hear the one about how American students have made no academic progress since the 1970’s? It’s now an official Trump talking point, but is it true? I recently sat down with long-time education journalist Karin Chenoweth to find out what’s really going on with student achievement and why pols and pundits keep getting the story wrong.

Jennifer Berkshire: OK - let’s kick this off with a quote from President Trump from his dramatic signing of an executive order to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Are you ready?

Karin Chenoweth: As ready as I’ll ever be.

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them. Today, American reading and math scores are near historical lows. This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math. The Federal education bureaucracy is not working.”

Berkshire: Now we’re going to delve into the specifics of what Trump is alleging here but first I just want to get your immediate response. Is he right?

Chenoweth: He is not right. The average student is reading and doing math better than the average student of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. And while we’re not where we want to be or where we should be, it’s just a lie to say that there’s been no improvement in academic achievement over the decades.

Berkshire: Trump and his allies, meanwhile, are taking this claim even further, basically making the case that American students have made no academic progress at all since the 1970’s–more proof, by the way, that we need to get rid of the Department of Education.

Chenoweth We can look at the data to see that this is completely false. Starting in the 1970’s up through 1988, we saw a huge improvement in reading in math for all groups of kids, but especially African American and Latino students. They were the kids who had been most harmed by segregation and underfunded schools. Instead of federal involvement failing these kids, which is what Trump is arguing, we can look pretty closely at the data and conclude that improvement was the result of federal engagement: desegregation and Title 1. (I highly recommend Rucker Johnson’s book Children of the Dream if you want to know more about this history.)

From 1988 to 1999, we entered into a period of stagnation which spurred No Child Left Behind. Then you can see the gaps closing. As for why things started to stagnate again from 2012 on, we don’t really know. My theory is that a lot of state budgets have never really recovered from the 2008 recession. And the Obama years were not great for education. They focused on the wrong things, like trying to weed out so-called bad teachers, and we lost momentum.

The other thing you never hear about is how much urban districts have improved. Chicago has seen enormous improvement over a period of decades. Large cities in general have shown improvement over a long period of time on what’s known as the main NAEP.

Berkshire: We’re going to skip over the fact that Trump is touting NAEP scores, even as his DOGE gang just took a chainsaw to our ability to measure student progress. I want to dwell for a moment on the word ‘proficiency,’ which appears multiple times in that executive order. Trump is using it to imply that the kids are dum dums, but ‘proficiency’ means something very specific in the NAEP context that we need your help to unpack.

Chenoweth: That’s right. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the NAEP test, what we call the Nation’s Report Card, very deliberately set the scale for proficiency at a high level. It’s aspirational, meaning that it’s at the level where we want all kids to be. It’s also significantly above grade level and significantly above what states set as the goal that they want kids to reach. And we should be aspirational and have ambitious goals. But when you hear Trump saying that two thirds of kids aren’t proficient in reading, it does not mean that two thirds of kids can’t read. Proficient according to NAEP is far above what most people would consider reading ability. Even ‘basic’ is higher than what people think.

Berkshire: The ‘schools are failing’ narrative has been around longer than schools themselves, but I feel like things took a turn last year with the release of the 2024 NAEP scores. In many ways, Trump is just adding his own spin to what we heard so much of from pundits and your colleagues, education journalists.

Chenoweth: A lot of the coverage of the 2024 main NAEP was really bad. I don’t want to sugarcoat the results. There’s no question that they were disappointing and that kids on average have not recovered from the pandemic. But the news reports were so alarming and apocalyptic that they were in some ways deceiving. Think about how many times you saw a story to the effect of ‘We lost two decades of progress.’ That just means we’re in the same situation we were when today’s parents were in school. Most parents won’t think that’s so horrendous.

Berkshire: Speaking of NAEP, a lot of people in edu-world seem to have been caught off guard by the fact that the DOGE-ing of the Department of Education has been aimed so directly at the folks who measure stuff. I’ve been making the case that this is all of a piece with the administration’s efforts to roll back equality. But I’m curious to get your take. Are you surprised that ED researchers have been such a target? And how will we know that Trump has made the schools great again if there isn’t any data?

Chenoweth: I was kind of surprised, because they’re getting rid of our one way of knowing how kids are doing overall. Trump and his allies rely heavily on NAEP to bash schools. On the other hand, we shouldn’t be surprised because they’re denying us the ability to know where we are on a whole range of things: weather, the economy. If there’s no data, what’s to stop Trump from coming out in a couple of years and saying ‘We’re #1! It worked!”?

I think there’s another reason why they’re going after education data. If we end up shoving a bunch of kids into voucher schools–as the administration seems intent on doing–scores will drop. That’s data that they’d much rather we didn’t see.

Berkshire: As people can tell from this interview, you’re a data person. When I’m asked about ‘what works’ in public education, I always recommend your most recent book, Districts that Succeed. But a few years ago you shifted your focus from fixing schools to saving them. Why?

Chenoweth: We’re in danger of losing public education. People want schools to be better and I agree. But they need to exist if we’re going to help them improve. Over the past three decades, the education world has actually developed a pretty broad understanding of what it takes to improve schools. And right when we know what needs to happen our public education system is in danger of being dismantled. And that’s horrifying.

Karin Chenoweth is the author of Districts that Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement and the founder of Democracy and Education, a network of current and aspiring school board members facing down extremist threats. You can read her brief, Is Academic Achievement Improving or Deteriorating?, here.