Let’s Make NAEP a True National Yardstick for Local Autonomy

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Student outcomes in K–12 education have largely stagnated over the recent decades. Despite incremental improvements in the 1990s and early 2000s, national academic performance peaked around 2013, while progress in closing achievement gaps among subgroups stalled even earlier. Recent developments at the Institute of Education Sciences, particularly the downsizing of staff for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play.  

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

This would require a feasible restructuring of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to focus on the annual creation and implementation of the NAEP, in contrast to its previous biennial schedule. Additionally, states already have the infrastructure for standardized testing, as all 50 states administer various assessments. 

Some adjustments might be necessary for the reformed IES, which would need to collaborate with state offices responsible for test administration to successfully implement the NAEP on an annual basis for all eligible students, not just the current sample populations. However, there are still many advantages to this approach.

First, NAEP provides a consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance. Many states report higher proficiency rates on their own assessments than on NAEP, creating a false sense of achievement. If all fourth and eighth grade students in states that receive federal Title I funding were required to take the NAEP annually, the discrepancy between state and national standards would become harder to ignore. States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations.

States such as Mississippi have already shown what’s possible when NAEP results are taken seriously. Mississippi’s so-called “miracle” — its leap into the top half of state rankings in 2020 and 2022—demonstrates the value of using NAEP-aligned standards as a driver for systemic change. By contrast, allowing states to accept federal funding without comparable transparency has led to low expectations and weak accountability frameworks.

Second, expanding NAEP would provide parents with a more accurate picture of how their children are performing relative to peers nationwide. Calls for greater transparency in education — amplified during and after the pandemic — have made clear that many families want more than vague reassurances from schools. A truly national assessment would offer objective, comparable data without increasing testing burdens year after year. In its current form, NAEP tests only samples of students, providing no real insight into how individual students or schools are doing.

Third, this proposal could significantly reduce unnecessary educational costs. To receive Title I funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states must administer annual assessments from grades 3 through 8, a requirement that consumes substantial classroom time, financial and instructional resources. 

If Congress eliminated this requirement and recommended that states administer only the NAEP in fourth and eighth grades, that could facilitate more targeted transparent evaluations and reduce assessment costs for states. Additionally, standardized tests administered from grades 3 to 8 may not be necessary for improving student outcomes. A study of test scores in Texas and Nebraska showed that, on average, a student’s test scores in their first year correlated at a rate greater than 0.90 with their next year performance.

Finally, making NAEP universal would offer a balanced form of federal oversight: less intrusive than programmatic mandates, but more informative than current reporting requirements. If decentralization is the path forward for U.S. education, it must be accompanied by a shared yardstick to assess progress. A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results. The Obama-era effort to tie teacher evaluations to student performance had little impact at the national level, though districts like Dallas and Washington, D.C., saw promising gains. These cases suggest that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts. 

Designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria. It would offer the federal government a low-cost, high-impact mechanism for improving transparency and setting consistent expectations without dictating how states should teach or allocate resources —it would be left up to them.

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

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