The education system often fails to communicate honestly with students, parents, and community members about how much students are actually learning. The discrepancy between actual student performance and what is reported is referred to as the “honesty gap.” A troubling example is the gap between students’ grades and their performance on standardized tests, which has grown tremendously since the pandemic. Grades are up, but test scores are down.
This is problematic because grades tend to carry more weight with students and parents than test scores. Many parents assume that the grades their children receive are accurate indicators of academic progress.
But this assumption is increasingly incorrect. Grades have become more and more disconnected from actual achievement. This may help explain why 90 percent of parents believe their children are performing at or above grade level in reading and math, even though only about one third of 4th- and 8th-grade students in the United States score at a proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Who is to blame for the widening honesty gap? I believe we all bear responsibility. We seem to have collectively lost our appetite for bad news. Parents don’t want to hear that their children are falling behind, and schools are reluctant to deliver that message. Meanwhile, states face little pushback when they lower testing standards and inflate proficiency rates.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the cognitive skills students learn in school really matter for later-life success, and glossing over declining test scores—our best measures of these skills—will not change this fundamental fact. Sending our children to school and pretending that they are learning is not a path to prosperity. It is a path to lower economic growth and a lower quality of life. We should demand high standards from our educational institutions, even if the truth hurts.
