Here’s a topic that doesn’t get enough attention: a number of states are handling pandemic-era student achievement declines by lowering the bar for academic success.
Most notably, some states have adjusted their ‘cut scores’ for determining proficiency on state tests. It’s a sleight of hand: the share of students considered “proficient” increases, even as student performance doesn’t improve. This makes schools look better, yet it’s controversial even among educators.
Linda Jacobson has reported on the issue in The 74, and Frannie Block just gave it a national spotlight in The Free Press.
Other states have lowered or eliminated high school graduation requirements, in the continuation of a twenty-five year trend.
I’m grateful for the media attention, and believe this conversation needs more visibility. We also need a comprehensive and current picture. I asked around for a complete list of states that have made changes since the pandemic, and one doesn’t seem to exist.
So, here’s my crack at it.
States Adjusting Proficiency Measures:
These states have changed proficiency thresholds since 2020:
States Softening Graduation Requirements:
These states have weakened graduation requirements since 2020:
I’m pretty sure this list is incomplete; Please help me flesh it out! Which brings me to…
Help Me Out Here
This is an exercise in crowdsourcing.
I’ll maintain a list of states where these changes are happening, linking to info for each state. Please comment or reach out if this list ought to be updated.
Sowing Trust Issues
These shifts are causing education journalists to have less trust in state assessment data nationally.
I wrote about this issue for The Grade, when exploring the reasons for low coverage of the Souhern Surge:
“In talks with reporters, I did uncover one challenge in getting traction for the Southern Surge story. One brilliant journalist privately acknowledged hesitation about trusting states’ own assessment data, because of periodic changes in cut scores. You only grasp the trends in Tennessee and Alabama by looking at their own recent assessments, alongside the semi-annual NAEP, for dual confirmation. I can see how journalists need to know which state data to trust, so I created a tracker for states that changed cut scores since 2020.”
That’s right – I initially created this tracker for journalists. We only get NAEP data every two years, so we need jouralists to explore (and trust) trends in state data in the other 45 states,.
We can’t have state assessments losing some of their punching weight because of a few bad apple states.
Additional Reading and Reflections
How good are your state’s proficiency benchmarks? A new FutureEd report lets you compare your state’s proficiency threshold to its results on the NAEP, our “national report card.” The NAEP standard is known to be high and it hasn’t wavered over time, so it’s a solid benchmark. Spoiler: most states report higher reading and math proficiency on their own assessments than the NAEP reports, often by a large margin.
We need to be able to learn from state trends and cross-state comparisons, in an era when 45 states have adopted new litracy legislation and we have leaders to learn from.
Let’s signal to state leaders that random changes to state proficiency thresholds are unacceptable, and won’t go unnoticed.
This post published on February 10th, 2025. As it is updated, its freshness date will be noted here.
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South Dakota is switching from their criterion based state test to the ACT. At a minimum, this obfuscates declines in proficiency.
Just because standards have been developed, does not mean they were developmentally appropriate. Several years ago I participated in a "bulletin board" that covered education topics. A middle school social studies teacher had been on the most recent (at that time) K-12 Social Standards committee for the state of CA. He reported to us that the committee began by asking the college level instructors and professors who were on the committee what knowledge they hoped incoming college freshman would bring with them. Once the committee articulated what graduating seniors should be able to know and do in their discipline, they built standards down from there. The project endeavored to plug skills into the K-12 standards, but was not concerned with what may or may not be developmentally appropriate for the age and grade level. It was just creating standards to fulfill the wishlist of college professors.