The Nation's Report Card will be out Jan. 29th. Here's what I'll be looking for in the results.

Students across the country take The Nation's Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, in a variety of subjects and grades. The most frequently administered assessments are the 4th and 8th grade math and reading tests, taken every two years. You can see results for the country as a whole, by state, and by some urban districts, as well as for a handful of other categories of schools like the Department of Defense and Catholic schools.

In addition to the scores coming out next month, we'll also get 12th grade scores in reading and math and 8th grade science scores later in 2025.

At a high level, The Nation's Report Card provides vital information about 3 big questions:

• How are students doing academically?

• Are different groups of students making progress over time—which ones and where?

• How are today's students doing compared to previous generations?

Everyone wants to know if scores overall are up or down since the last Report Card. That matters. But it's also vital to look at the progress of groups of students to assess whether all young people are getting what they need from our education systems. And it's important to track the nation's progress over time. The jobs of today require more complex knowledge and skills than those of the past, and we need to be sure our schools are preparing students for this reality.

Here are some additional things I'll be looking for:

1. Academic recovery: 2019 vs. 2024 could tell a clearer story.

On NAEP release day, it's pretty typical to focus on how the latest scores compare to those that were released two years earlier—in this case in 2022. That will once again be important, but it also will be critical to look at how students did in 2024 compared to 2019. That was the last time students took NAEP before the pandemic disrupted schooling in America and the world.

We need to know: Are students back to working at pre-pandemic levels? Have students surpassed those levels? (If so, which students and where, so we can learn from them!) Or are kids still struggling in significant ways and performing worse than they would be if it were not for COVID-19 and its aftermath? Other assessments, including state and international assessments, indicate we haven't made up all the lost ground. We'll know for sure on January 29.

2. Are gaps between high- and low-performing students continuing to grow? 

Average scores can mask patterns in student achievement, so it's important to look at the achievement by groups of students, including those working at different NAEP achievement levels.

Starting in 2015, the gap between high-performing and low-performing students started growing. 

On the 2022 NAEP, we saw this starkly in 4th grade, where lower-performing students experienced much sharper declines in math and reading than their higher-achieving peers. In 8th grade, students working at all achievement levels lost ground, particularly in math. (Don’t read this as good news because 8th grade math scores fell steeply for everyone.)

I'll be looking to see whether the new results signal we need to do more to support struggling students or whether efforts to close this achievement gap may be paying off.

While historically underserved groups are overrepresented in the bottom quartile of scores, low-performing students are a diverse group of students. We need to better understand their needs and the latest trends in their achievement. 

3. Student achievement over time

Some of the downward trends we saw on the last Nation's Report Card started before 2022, so I'll be looking to see if the 2024 scores alter these trendlines.

NAEP reading and math results go back to 1992—for the nation and for every state—so we can look over time to see how students in each state and nationwide have progressed.

Here's the bad news: In reading, the story is one of minimal progress from the early 1990s to 2015 for 4th grade and 2013 for 8th grade, followed by declines at both grades in 2019 and 2022. In 2022, students in both grades were scoring about where students did in the early 1990s. 

In math, we saw significant progress from 1990 to about 2013. After that, scores generally stagnated until the pandemic, when they dropped substantially in both grade levels. Scores were still higher in math in 2022 than in the early 1990s but substantially lower than in 2019.

4. What state and local leaders in education and beyond are going to do with the results.  

I hope policymakers and education leaders use the upcoming NAEP results to drive evidence-based decisions and positive changes that can help all students thrive.

Disparities between NAEP and state assessment results can lead to important conversations about state standards and assessments and how those reflect academic expectations for students and align with students' future educational goals and broader workforce needs.

Many states also look to NAEP to inform the design of their own standards and assessments, and some use it to push for a higher bar. Massachusetts was one of the earliest to raise its standards in this way in the 1990s. And, perhaps most famously, under the leadership of then-Superintendent Carey Wright, Mississippi raised standards to meet NAEP expectations a decade ago, helping to fuel major reading gains in the Magnolia State.

Of course, high expectations alone won’t improve outcomes for kids, but they're a necessary precondition to supporting schools and communities to help children achieve academically.

I hope you’ll tune in on January 29, but please don't tune out the next day. We need sustained attention on the nation's schools and continued efforts to ensure all students get the education they need to thrive in the years ahead.

(P.S. Click here if you’d like to receive an email announcement from the National Assessment Governing Board about the results.)