Opinion: Accountability Is Under Attack, Not Just From Washington, But From the Bottom Up

There has been a lot of well-justified hand-wringing about President Donald Trump’s efforts to gut the U.S. Department of Education. These moves have included shrinking or delaying the NAEP exam, canceling large-scale ongoing survey research projects and slashing federal research grants. Together, this centralized, top-down attack will severely hamper the ability of researchers, educators and policymakers to know what’s working in education and to do anything to make the system better. 

But considerably less attention has been paid to the decentralized, bottom-up efforts by well-intentioned policymakers and practitioners at all levels that accomplish the same thing — gutting our collective knowledge of how well kids are doing in school. These efforts, which include abolishing testing, undermining accountability, watering down grades and struggling to respond rapidly to artificial intelligence, are making it impossible to understand who’s doing well and who needs support to get back on track. In the long run, it will be harder to run effective education organizations, and children will be worse off for it. 

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The latest piece of evidence for this crisis is a bombshell report from UC San Diego that shows shocking increases in the proportion of students arriving unable to perform anything approaching college mathematics. These are students who have excelled in the K-12 system — getting the As and Bs in allegedly rigorous courses that are necessary to be admitted to a highly selective university. But placement tests upon arrival at UCSD show the incoming students are far behind, forcing them into remedial courses and making it harder for them to complete their degrees. 

While the report has garnered substantial attention and shocked many, its results weren’t surprising to those of us who have followed the trends over the last decade. From the bottom up, in individual schools and districts, universities and state departments of education, every signal of student readiness has been relentlessly hollowed out.

The clearest cause of this trend is the gutting of testing and accountability. In the wake of COVID, universities made standardized tests optional or banned them altogether. The University of California system removed these data from applications. As a result, college admissions officers lack important data that convey key information about student readiness, data that are especially valuable at selective universities. At the same time, K-12 testing and accountability have been substantially undermined since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and many experts (including me) believe this is at least partially to blame for a decade of stagnation. 

Without standardized tests, colleges must rely primarily on grades to gauge student readiness. But these cannot provide the same level of information that tests can. It was always true that grades and course titles were imprecise measures of what children had learned. But the information gleaned from classroom performance has been weakening as grade inflation runs rampant. Perhaps well intentioned, policies like not awarding Fs or requiring teachers to give at least a 50% for any completed assignment have contributed to upward pressure on grades. But more generally, there is the cultural pressure to be kind and lenient to students by offering them unlimited makeups and refusing to hold the line on high expectations. Many factors contribute, but the result is that grades provide less and less useful information, which is a disaster with so few other data points to use. 

Even other elements of the education system that might be useful for understanding student performance are increasingly losing their ability to signal college readiness. Think of admissions essays and the ways they are easily corrupted by artificial intelligence. As a college instructor, my ability to gauge students’ writing and reasoning abilities is much weaker now than it was even a couple years ago, and this trend may well accelerate. Students increasingly use AI to write college application essays that are then evaluated in part by AI — an almost laughable situation, if it weren’t so grim. 

There is potential in this moment, however, to recognize the value of standardized assessments that cannot be undermined by artificial intelligence. Universities should again require prospective students to take a validated standardized test, but in a way that maximizes their benefits and minimizes potential harms. This means states should do things like requiring that all students take college admission tests like the SAT or ACT (and if they are state-mandated, they should also be paid for by the state), while also leveraging free test preparation materials so students can feel ready. Even better would be for states to make sure tests are connected to what students are taught, perhaps building standards-aligned high school assessments that public universities would accept as evidence of readiness. Think of Advanced Placement exams or state end-of-course tests that are standards-aligned. These kinds of policies would make the tests fairer while still providing student-readiness data of high enough quality that universities can make good decisions using them. 

Grades also need to mean something again. This involves rolling back reforms that lower expectations for students. And in the context of AI, it also entails helping teachers figure out how to assess student learning in ways that are trustworthy and valid. Without these kinds of fundamental changes, neither classroom teachers nor universities will be able to make the kinds of decisions that will help ensure student success.

Failure to act in this moment will harm both students and institutions — and ultimately, all of us.