But new data suggests that’s changing. 

In a recent of 20,000 parents, respondents said they trust communication from their children’s teachers more than any other source of information to judge whether their kids are on track. That was the case regardless of whether parents thought their children performed on grade level. 

The finding came as a surprise to Bibb Hubbard, president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents understand student achievement data. In , including surveys her own organization has conducted since , parents have listed grades as the primary indicator of student performance. 

“For the first time, grades are not the number one factor,” she said. “Teachers really are on the front lines in terms of communicating to families about where their kids are.”

As one who urges schools to level with families about student progress, Hubbard zeroed in on that point among the trove of data that 50CAN, a national education advocacy organization, released in October. 

One reason for the shift, she said, is the falling importance of grades as a dependable measure of learning. Long before COVID, and news reports pointed to examples of : While grade-point averages have steadily increased, objective measures of performance like remained flat. States and districts further relaxed grading standards during the pandemic, and parents took notice. The growth of online communication apps that allow teachers to update parents throughout the year on children’s progress have also lessened report cards’ influence, Hubbard said.

“Just putting the grade in the portal is not going to be sufficient for any parent right now,” she added. “They want that connection. They want that relationship.”

At Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, Algebra teacher Cicely Woodard said she tries to be as specific as possible when grading assignments by labeling tests with the skills students are learning — like exponents — so parents don’t have to guess. But she also leans on parents to understand why students might be struggling.

“I’ll say, ‘This is what I’m observing.’ Then I’ll be quiet and listen,” she said “I can learn so much from parents who know their children really well.”

Almost 30% of parents in the 50CAN survey said they rely on that type of communication from teachers more than any other source of information. Report card grades were second, with 20%. 

Parents who believe their children are performing below grade level value that interaction with teachers even more than those who think their kids are at or above grade level, the data shows — 36 to 28%. During the 2023-24 school year, parents who thought their children weren’t meeting expectations were more likely than others to communicate with teachers outside of parent-teacher conferences, talk to their school’s principal and consult with their child’s guidance counselor.

They also want their kids to get additional instruction. If they had the time or money, parents who think their children are below grade level would choose tutoring over organized sports and art, dance or music lessons, the survey showed. But a higher percentage of those parents also said tutoring was too expensive or wasn’t available in their community.

“They are engaged. They care about their kids, and they are not getting the support that they necessarily need,” Hubbard said.

Melony Watson, a mom of six in Fort Worth, Texas, said she’s barely looked at report cards in two years. She felt misled when one of her daughters kept making the honor roll even though she couldn’t read. 

“I’m a proud parent, sitting there clapping and jumping up and down because my baby’s walking across the stage, getting certificate after certificate,” Watson said. But by third grade, she told her daughter’s teacher that she saw signs of a learning disability. Her daughter wrote letters and numbers backwards and out of order. “They’re like, ‘No, no, she’s just a COVID baby. She’s going to be a little behind.’ ”

Watson ultimately quit her job as a substitute teacher and homeschooled her daughter for a year before enrolling her in a different school. Now, with her children in third through 12th grade, she is in frequent contact with their teachers, especially in eighth grade algebra and ninth grade social studies. 

“I get weekly updates to know what test my child has failed,” she said. “I have made myself known. If those teachers think that you don’t care, they’re not going to go the extra mile.”

‘Tipping point’

Parents aren’t the only ones who think grades provide a less-reliable predictor of success than standardized tests. Several universities, mostly Ivy league institutions, have reinstated for admissions after dropping them during the pandemic. 

“I do think that it is possible that we are nearing a tipping point with regard to grade inflation,” said Adam Tyner, who wrote about the issue in a for the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he is national research director. “Maybe parents are also starting to see teacher-assigned grades as a less valuable signal.”

To Hubbard, the results suggest that teachers need better training on discussing test scores with parents. Surveys of teachers conducted by show educators often fear either that parents won’t believe their children are behind or that administrators will overrule their grading decisions.

“It needs to be an expectation for teachers to have ongoing communications with families — which takes time, training and support,” she said. “Otherwise, families will continue to be sidelined in being able to most effectively support their children’s learning and development.”

The hope of the “Skills for the Future” collaboration is to make it easy for schools to treat so-called “durable” skills such as critical thinking, teamwork and perseverance the same as traditional subjects like math and English. That includes giving students new tests and a new report card that shows how well they have mastered those other skills as they apply to colleges or jobs.

The collaboration between the Educational Testing Service and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching started last year and added five states this spring — Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. The Mastery Transcript Consortium which has already built a mastery-based report card became part of ETS, the company that runs the SAT and GRE college admissions tests, in May.

The partnership comes as some businesses edge toward skills-based hiring, rather than hiring for having a college degree. The partners also want to increase mastery or competency learning, where students progress at their own speed, rather than in lockstep with a class.

“This whole idea that education could be focused on durable and transferable skills is super exciting to me,” said Scott Looney, founder of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which just added its innovative report card to the partnership this month. “It’ll make school more engaging, interesting for kids, but also make it more meaningful.”

“I think this is going to give us the ability to take this to millions of kids,” he said.

Carnegie President Tim Knowles said this new effort is a full reversal of what his foundation once promoted. In the early 1900s, the foundation popularized the credit hour or Carnegie Unit concept of measuring learning by hours spent on a subject. 

But Knowles said it is clear now that students learn at different speeds and the measure that share’s his foundation’s name doesn’t work anymore. ETS, Carnegie and others in the mastery movement want students to be rated on progress toward each skill, at whatever speed works for them, regardless of when a grading period ends.

Knowles said he hopes to replace the credit hours model “where bells ring between classes, where it’s time, not competency, that is the rule of the day.”

“Our aim is to build a new architecture that would actually enable competency-based learning to move from the edges of the profession where it’s lived for 100 years to the mainstream,” he said.

The end result, said Laura Slover, managing director of the effort, will hopefully be a way to show students’ character traits that many believe are just as important to success in school, jobs and life as academic knowledge.

“We are convinced that there’s a lack of social and economic mobility in the U.S., and that we’ve moved from a knowledge economy to a skills economy,” said Slover. “We want a portable transcripts or wallet, if you will, that shows where students are in their development, skills and abilities that they can use with employers, they can use to open the doors to college, and that are fair and reliable and meaningful for kids.” 

That shift, though, relies on schools to determine which skills to focus on and how to measure them. While there are many tests on subjects like English and math, there are no standard ways of measuring skills like communication, collaboration or digital literacy that carry across teachers, subjects, schools or states.

This spring, the five states that are dipping their toes into mastery joined Skills for The Future to help develop ways of measuring student progress on these durable skills. 

ETS said first steps included looking at the “Portrait of a Graduate” or “Portrait of a Learner” statements that — see Nevada’s or North Carolina’s   — that list the attributes and values they want students to have. The most common traits that will be the first  priority, said Knowles, are communication, collaboration, persistence, and digital literacy, with critical thinking and creative thinking close behind.

ETS, Carnegie and the states met in California in April to brainstorm approaches, with each state now meeting with teachers, students, colleges and businesses to develop ideas to pilot as early as January, 2025. A few early possibilities include interactive testing that adjusts questions – making them harder or easier or zeroing in on certain topics – based on student answers, as some online tests do now.

Some tests could be game-based, instead of just having students answer questions.

The partners are discussing how to use artificial intelligence and portfolios of student work such as papers, artwork, and projects created for multiple classes, as well as extracurricular or out of school activities to show character and interdisciplinary skills.

Portfolios can post a challenge for schools and for one of the long-range goals of the project – that skills can be reliably measured and believable to business or college admissions departments. Mastery schools use portfolios now, but those are dependent on subjective decisions by schools and teachers and are not verifiable to outsiders.

But Nevada state superintendent Jhone Ebert said Skills For The Future could develop guidelines that could be used in schools everywhere to create more consistency. 

Or some rating decisions may be left to teachers, but a third party may be able to offer a seal to be added to the new transcripts to offer some verification.

Ebert said she wanted Nevada schools, some of which have tested mastery concepts after a 2017 state law change, to have a role in creating new assessments.

“What has not gone well in the past is that someone just makes it a determination that this is the magic wand and how we’re going to measure everything,” she said. “Then it comes down and classroom teachers haven’t been involved, state leaders haven’t been involved. It is just this tool that has been made available and we are all going to adopt.”

“This process is much different,” she said. “We are all working together to co-design what it will look like and provide that feedback and input up front.”

The Mastery Transcript Consortium started in 2017 with private schools who wanted to show student progress from “developing” skills to “mastering” them. It built a transcript model that typically shows about 60 skills, as each school determines, instead of just the half dozen courses a student might take each semester. Some schools have used versions of it in college applications since 2019.

It now has 370 private and public schools or districts as members and says 500 colleges agree to accept students using the transcript.

It also has already built an intermediate report on student progress on durable skills that schools can use as a supplement to traditional academic report cards, if they’re not ready to make a full leap yet.

Though it keeps adding members, director Mike Flanagan said it is still a small group without the clout to take its work to a massive scale.

“For us to reach millions of students across the entire country on our own would have taken an infinite amount of time,” he said. “It’s virtually impossible. But ETS is one of the few organizations in the sector that has the scale and capacity to credibly help us reach millions of learners.”

Flanagan added that having ETS, Carnegie and five states joining the work  “lends enormous credibility to our effort.”

Whether this effort is enough to make mastery and measurement of soft skills take hold nationally remains  to be seen. Attempts to use mastery in states like Maine and New Hampshire never fully caught on and are often .

Among the pitfalls, he noted, are federal testing requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act that don’t allow flexibility when students must learn some academic skills. And schools and parents could balk at a shift, he said, though Skills For the Future might succeed in doing enough advance work that it would be easier for schools and teachers to adopt.

“It’s a real challenge to do it well, but it’s good that somebody with the horsepower that ETS and Carnegie (have) are giving it a shot,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. “Let’s not kid ourselves. If it wasn’t so hard, somebody would have done it.”

During a heavy snowstorm Tuesday that caused schools to close all over Wisconsin, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly spoke by telephone with the Wisconsin Examiner about the health of the state’s public education system, student achievement, the growth of school vouchers, political attacks on diversity and her hopes for the coming year.

Parents bill of rights

As we spoke, Republican legislators were preparing to hold an executive session Thursday on , a “Parents Bill of Rights” that encourages lawsuits by parents who feel that their rights have been violated because they were not informed about medical services offered at school or about the discussion of “controversial subjects”  in class, including gender identity and racism, or because they were not given the authority to determine the names and pronouns used to address their children.

Under the bill, a parent or guardian who successfully asserts a claim “may recover declaratory relief, injunctive relief, reasonable attorney’s fees and costs, and up to $10,000 for any other appropriate relief.”

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“The reality is that meaningful parental engagement is happening every single day between our teachers and their students’ families and caregivers,” Underly said. The Parents Bill of Rights “is designed to shut down discussion and creates an environment of fear for our educators because it inserts them into a culture war that no one should be fighting in the first place.”

She sees the bill as part of a larger pattern of attacks on public schools and democracy itself.

“You think about the things that the Legislature picks up on,” Underly said. “Let’s attack libraries. Let’s attack the curriculum. Let’s attack teachers, let’s attack school boards because they wanted to wear masks during the virus. … I think it’s really a way to make sure that we instill distrust in our public institutions.”

There is “a lot of misinformation out there,” Underly added, propagated by people and groups insinuating that schools provide inappropriate materials to kids. “That’s by design. Misinformation is designed to stoke outrage.”

Another Republican bill, , would require public schools to comply with written requests from residents in their districts to inspect a textbook, curriculum or instructional material within 14 days.

“That’s really burdensome,” said Underly. “Let me just say right now, if you have a question about curriculum, you can access that. You contact the school, the principal and the teacher will work to get you the information.”

School voucher lawsuit

The message that public schools are “failing” and do not adequately serve Wisconsin families has been promoted for decades by advocates for school privatization, including the Bradley Foundation, which also Milwaukee’s first-in-the-nation school voucher program. That program, which started out serving 350 kids, has mushroomed to include more than 52,000 students in the statewide, Racine and Milwaukee programs.

In December, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a challenging Wisconsin’s private school voucher program. The suit, sponsored by Minocqua Brewing Co. owner Kirk Bangstad, named Underly, in her official capacity, as a defendant. It charged that taxpayer-financed private school vouchers are a huge financial drain, pushing local public school districts into a “death spiral” and that they violate the state constitution’s promise to provide high-quality public schools for every child.

Asked to comment on the lawsuit, Underly said she couldn’t speak to the constitutionality of school vouchers. But, she added,  “I believe that we cannot afford two school systems.”

“We need to robustly fund the system that serves all kids,” she said, “and that’s our public schools.”

(Late last year Underly another recent Supreme Court lawsuit, filed by teachers and other public employees challenging Act 10, the 2011 law that took away most collective bargaining rights from most public employees: “Returning collective bargaining rights to public sector employees will strengthen our educator workforce, and strengthening our educator workforce will improve our children’s education and create a stronger future for our state,” she said in a statement.)

Even though the voucher lawsuit was kicked back down to lower court, Underly said it could still help raise awareness  that, unlike public schools, which are open to every child, Wisconsin’s school choice programs “are allowing these schools that accept vouchers to discriminate against students, students with disabilities, students who are LGBTQ+.”

Worrying about LGBTQ kids

Underly said she worries “all the time” about the well-being of LGBTQ kids in Wisconsin. She cited data showing that “these kids who struggle to feel included or to be seen, you know, their mental health struggles are higher.”

“At the heart of all this I think what I would like people to realize, and I think many people do, [is that] at the center of all of this is a child.”

“And when we attack them,” she added, “when we tell them, you know, their identity doesn’t matter or we have to take down symbols that show that they’re included, that’s hurting them. … It’s saying that you don’t belong here or you’re not wanted. … I just want to tell people, these are kids. These are human beings. And they deserve love and empathy.”

Missing the Regents’ vote to cut back DEI

Along with recent efforts to ban books and remove LGBTQ Pride flags, Wisconsin schools have been at the center of a battle over diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. Underly, who serves on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, was absent for the vote in which the Regents reversed themselves and agreed to legislative Republicans’ demands that they eliminate DEI positions in exchange for promised funding for faculty raises and capital improvements.

Underly was out of the country, traveling with her elderly mother in Austria, on a vacation she said she’d had to reschedule several times, when the Regents voted 9-8 to reject the deal limiting diversity positions on Saturday, Dec. 9. She was still out of the country the following Wednesday, Dec 13, when the Regents reversed their decision in a second vote.

Between votes, Underly issued a statement asking that the second vote be postponed so she could attend. She had intermittent internet access, she explained, and wouldn’t be available at the meeting time. But the Regents went ahead without her.

“Part of my frustration with that is that my position on diversity, equity and inclusion is very clear,” Underly said. “I think people knew how I was going to vote. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it …  I wasn’t part of any of the discussions.”

Like Gov. Tony Evers, Underly doesn’t believe there should have been any further negotiations between the Regents and the Legislature over funds that were already approved as part of the state budget.

Now, as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos pledges to eliminate every trace of DEI throughout the state, Underly said, “It’s definitely that slippery slope argument. You give in on one thing, and they certainly will want to take more.”

Still, she added, “these programs aren’t going to go away. … They exist to make sure that every citizen in the state of Wisconsin has access to higher education. That includes veterans. That includes kids from rural Wisconsin who want to study to become doctors. It includes women. It includes kids who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Will UW hold onto minority scholarship programs and other targets of Republicans in the Legislature, and somehow meet its agreement to eliminate the language of DEI without actually getting rid of programs that promote diversity?

“I don’t know,” Underly said. “I guess in my role as Regent what I do look forward to is having these conversations and in many ways protecting these positions [including] the scholarships and [other] components.”

What about voucher schools that serve underserved kids?

On the flip side, what does Underly make of the argument made by school choice advocates like Madison’s One City independent charter school founder Kaleem Caire, that Wisconsin’s between Black and white students is unacceptable and the lack of diversity among teaching staff contributes to a lousy environment in the local public school district for Black kids?

“I’m not going to say that his heart’s not in the right place,” said Underly. “We want all kids to be successful, and he is in a community and he interacts with children of color and their families all the time.”

Still, “I don’t think the answer is pulling kids out of public schools and funding private schools,” Underly said. “I would argue the opposite and say we need to put the resources in the public schools so that all kids can be successful.”

Working on teacher training, curriculum, adjusting the length of the school day or the school year are all “ways we could address the achievement gap, and the opportunity gaps that we see, especially among children of color,” she said.

“This is really where we get at the root of what equity is,” Underly added, “getting the schools what they need, so that their kids can be successful, and that’s not going to be the same thing in every school or in every community.”

Poverty and student success

Among the biggest equity issues public schools must address, Underly said, is poverty.

Children facing housing insecurity and hunger are “not going to score as well on a standardized test,” she said.

“What public schools have done is they’ve tried to level that playing field. They have provided food for kids, they provide stability, whether it’s for in-school or after-school programs, they provide the art and the music and these enrichment classes that kids in poverty perhaps can’t afford to get outside of school.”

The whole purpose of public schools is to create a more equitable society by providing opportunity to kids whose families live in poverty. “That’s a fundamental value of democracy,” said Underly. “That’s inclusion — making sure that not just the wealthy have access to these things.”

Fundamentally, Underly agrees with the plaintiffs in the anti-voucher lawsuit that the private school voucher movement undermines democracy. “Public schools are among the most democratic institutions that you can think of because they accept everybody, regardless of their language, their socioeconomic status, their gender, who their parents are, their immigrant status. Because that’s what inclusion is. And when you have these outside groups attack public schools, they’re really attacking that democratic institution.”

School report cards

The latest round of released by DPI showed students test scores continuing to improve after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

None of Wisconsin’s school districts is rated as “failing” in the latest assessments and 94% of districts meet or exceed  expectations. But critics say DPI is setting the bar too low. Will Flanders of Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty told : “While DPI may tout there has been an increase across the board, we still have districts like Milwaukee where proficiency rates are less than 20% and somehow that seems to be meeting expectations.”

Public school student proficiency rates for 2022-23 were better than in 2020-21 and 2021-22. But they still seem low:  38.9% were proficient in English language arts and 37.4% were proficient in math. Students participating in the state’s Private School Choice Programs, however, had even lower proficiency rates of 22.1% in English language arts and 17.9% in math in 2022-23.

Student assessment scores are only one factor in determining district report card scores, a spokesperson for DPI explains. For districts with high percentages of low-income students, growth is weighted more significantly than achievement — a .

“Our public education system should be about getting every kid what they need – in the way they need it – in order to achieve success,” Underly said.

In announcing the latest assessment data, DPI pointed to a that found Wisconsin’s performance standards in reading and math were among the highest in the nation, corresponding to higher levels of proficiency as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Big financial challenges for public schools

Still, schools face big challenges, particularly those with large numbers of low-income and special education students and English language learners. The biggest challenge, Underly said, is revenue.

After more than a decade of school funding that , and a less than 30% state reimbursement for special education — a mandatory cost that is eating up school districts’ budgets, driving deep cuts in other programs, public school advocates with the latest state budget.

Gov. Evers had adopted DPI’s proposals in his own budget, including a big increase in the state reimbursement for special education from less than 30% to 60%, lifting local revenue limits and providing a total funding increase of $2.6 billion. The Legislature stripped that down to $1 billion, and left 40% of school districts with less funding this year than they had under the previous, zero-increase budget.

Remaining hopeful part of the job

Despite the existential challenges facing Wisconsin public schools, including the elimination, next year, of the cap on enrollment for voucher schools, Underly said she has a lot of hope for 2024.

“When we talk to kids, especially the ones that remember COVID — middle school, high school kids — they have a lot of hope for the future.”

She is already working on her next budget proposal, which will include teacher recruitment, increasing funding for mental health and, once again, an increase in the state’s special education reimbursement, as well as programs including free meals that address poverty.

“We need to get kids what they need, so that they can be successful and making sure that they’re not hungry is really critical for them to be able to focus and concentrate,” she said.

“I think it’s important that we continue this hopeful outlook because that’s what our schools need,” Underly added. “Our schools don’t need to be attacked. Our students don’t need to be attacked. So just supporting our schools, supporting our students and supporting that hope is part of supporting their education.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

The school, which serves 400 students pre-kindergarten through second grade in Maryland’s Baltimore City Public Schools, is rethinking the way it operates to boost parental involvement, said first-grade teacher Kaylah Crawford.

Crawford, who is in charge of family engagement at Arundel, said every student will lead their own parent-teacher conference this year, giving their families a glimpse of what they do in the classroom.

“Students will be leading their conferences by saying, ‘This is what I’m doing in school’ and then parents will be able to see (their child’s work) firsthand,” Crawford said. “It’s more engaging for families to hear from the student about how they’re performing.”

Parent perception of their child’s educational progress is tricky for many schools around the nation. A recently released national study has unveiled there’s a stark gap between parents’ knowledge of their child’s performance in school and their actual achievement in the classroom.

released in November by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes, surveyed roughly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students nationwide about their experiences with and perceptions of their child’s educational achievement.

What researchers found was that parents don’t have a complete understanding of their child’s progress, said Bibb Hubbard, founder of , a national parent advocacy organization.

Nearly 9 out of 10 parents surveyed believe their child is performing at grade level in reading (88%) and math (89%) despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track. showed that at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, public schools reported on average half of their students were below grade level.

“We just can’t afford to leave parents on the sidelines right now. We absolutely don’t have 9 out of 10 students performing at or above grade level, unfortunately,” Hubbard told The 74. “We need to give parents more information.”

The study also found that nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) said report cards — often considered the “holy grail” of measurements, Hubbard said — were important in determining whether their child is at grade level. And for 79% of parents surveyed, those report cards showed their children getting mostly B grades or better.

Hubbard said oftentimes, good grades equal “on grade level” for parents.

“That’s because they’ve not been told otherwise,” she said. “Grades don’t necessarily reflect grade-level mastery. You can also have your fourth grader getting an A or B in reading and that’s because they are reading at a second-grade level and they are getting B’s on their quizzes at a second-grade level.”

Crawford said her building principal strives to be transparent with parents about grades, but recently it has become more evident that some students complete homework without understanding all of the content.

“(Turning in finished homework) doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re able to read or even always able to complete work independently,” Crawford said. “So one of the things that we’ve done to target some of those discrepancies is starting different family programming.”

Arundel Elementary School launched a program called Family University in December, Crawford said. Parents can communicate with school staff to learn more about what’s happening in the classroom. They will also get feedback about what their child needs to work on academically.

“We learned through every program that we have within the building that the goal is to teach the parents something that would better prepare them to have a scholar within the school system,” Crawford said.

When parents are more informed about their child’s academic progress, they are more likely to take action and discuss concerns with their child’s teacher, Hubbard said.

The study found that 97% of parents who know their child is below grade level in math are worried about their child’s math skills. Only 22% of the parents who knew their child was at or above grade level in math were concerned about their child’s math skills.

Parents were also asked about what worries they have about their children.

“For the parents who perceive their child to be at or above grade level, their top worries are social media and emotional well-being … reading and math fall to the very bottom of their worries,” Hubbard said. “For those parents who have information that their child is not performing at grade level, their number one worry is math or reading.”

Researchers also unearthed racial differences in parents’ perceptions of how well their child was doing in school. The study introduced a hypothetical scenario to participants where their child receives a B in math but has two below-grade-level math test scores. While more than half of parents (56%) said they would be very or extremely concerned, Black parents were more likely to say they would be concerned (72%) compared with Hispanic (56%) and white parents (52%). 

Black and Hispanic parents were also more aware of their child’s academic performance in the study, Hubbard said.

Black (42%) and Hispanic (40%) parents were found less likely than white parents (54%) to say their child was performing above grade level in reading, with a similar finding in math. 

Contradicting that Black parents don’t care about their child’s education, Hubbard said, “Black parents in particular are taking more action, thinking and more deeply worrying. The Black parent in this dataset really emerges as the super active parent that’s really focused on academics.”

Lakisha Young, co-founder of Oakland REACH, a parent empowerment group that recently launched a large-scale parent-led tutoring program, said Black parents in Oakland have been more aware that something isn’t right with their child’s achievement, but they don’t know what to do about it.

“They’re definitely plugged in around something not being right,” Young said. “We asked our parents what was keeping them up at night and they just said, ‘I know my child’s not reading on the level they should be. But I’m not really getting a lot of help from the school to figure out the best thing for me to do to move forward.’ ”

The parent perception problem in education is solvable, Hubbard said — parents need to look beyond their child’s grades and engage with teachers to get to the bottom of their achievement.

“Teachers say that the number one way to know how your child is achieving is to ask them,” Hubbard writes in the study. “Asking teachers to unpack those factors and focus on grade-level learning is how to know where to lean in and help.”

Young said when her own son is struggling in his eighth-grade classes, he’s not the one to inform her — his teachers are. 

“I think things that continue to be helpful for families is to be able to feel like they can engage with the school and I think it really starts with building a relationship early,” Young said. “Kind of (letting) the school know, ‘I’m here, I’m accessible. I care. I want to understand these things about what’s going on with my kid.’ ”

Learning Heroes has been working to boost parent engagement across the nation, most recently with its campaign. The campaign partners with local nonprofits to connect parents with teachers and helps them understand achievement scores, among other resources. 

In addition to the national project, Go Beyond Grades has local campaigns, most recently launched in St. Louis, Missouri, but is also in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

“Grades are important, but we need to unpack that a little bit and get some additional information about how your child is doing,” Hubbard said. “The call to action is pretty simple.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York provides financial support to Learning Heroes and The 74.

, which relies largely on recent findings from outside research groups and the federal government, warns that on just about every indicator that matters — basic skills, college going, mental health and more — the pandemic has set older students back.

“Time is running out for these kids,” said Robin Lake, director of , a research organization at Arizona State University. “Many have already exited the K-12 system, either by graduating or essentially disappearing on us. Too many kids still are missing — we don’t know if they’ve dropped out or where they’ve gone.”

Outside researchers who study these students said the fears are justified. In response, Lake and others are proposing a raft of reforms, including extending “gap years” to any high school graduates who need time to catch up — as well as a new commitment to reforming high school so it works for more students. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona acknowledged the slow pace of academic turnaround, calling it “appalling and unacceptable.”

“It’s like as a country we’ve normalized those gaps,” he said in separate remarks to reporters Tuesday,

Cardona spoke just before the department unveiled new efforts to spur pandemic recovery, including $50 million in competitive grants for literacy and higher expectations on districts to track and reverse chronic absenteeism. The department also released new data showing that roughly 187,000 tutors and mentors have signed up through its National Partnership for Student Success — bringing it closer to its goal of recruiting 250,000 adults to help students get back on track by 2025.

‘Insidious and hidden’

As of this fall, researchers said, about 13.5 million students in four high school graduating classes have been affected by the pandemic.

CRPE first issued its “State of the American Student” report in September 2022, saying pandemic school closures in 2020 and 2021 led to “unprecedented academic setbacks” for American students that made pre-existing inequalities and the nation’s youth mental health crisis worse.

A year later, CRPE says, students are still struggling in many areas. They point to record-low math and reading scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress for fourth- and eighth-grade students — in both grades, one in three can’t read at even the “basic” achievement level.

And missed more than 10% of school days during the 2021-22 school year, twice as many as in previous years. More than reported “stunted behavioral and social-emotional development” in students because of the pandemic, researchers note.

But they say schools should pay extra attention to older students, many of whom lost critical instruction time during the pandemic. 

The pandemic, Lake said, “is continuing to derail learning throughout K-12. But what we came away with was that the derailment is looking a little bit more insidious and hidden, in some ways. That is true especially for older students.”

The , for instance, needs 7.4 months of schooling to catch up to pre-pandemic levels in reading, and 9.1 months of schooling in math, according to recent assessments.

Last year’s NAEP scores showed that 30% of eighth graders performed “” in reading; 38% were in math. At the same time, just 2% of students received at school, which Lake called “a massive missed opportunity.” 

In a few places, researchers noted, the pandemic knocked older students off track, as in Washington state, where 14 percent of public high school students received at least during the 2020-2021 school year.

Even college-bound high school students are underperforming: The on the ACT college admission test last year was 19.8, they noted, the lowest since 1991.

Researchers also noted that, overall, college going is down: Between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. higher education system lost an estimated .

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in advance of the report’s release, Lake said recent data on college are “extremely concerning.”

She called for the development of what she calls a “New American High School” that abandons academic tracking and standardized diplomas for a system that helps each student “understand their own conception of a good life” through knowledge and skills. It would also help them more easily change course if needed.

In the report, Lake noted several promising new models, including Colorado’s , designed to help rural districts create career-relevant learning experiences aligned to the needs and aspirations of local economies.

She also highlighted Seckinger High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a planned artificial intelligence-themed high school that will offer a college prep curriculum “taught through the lens of artificial intelligence.” Students will also be able to pursue an education in developing AI, she said. 

A gap year for struggling students

Lake proposed that high schools and community colleges consider a new kind of post-high school “gap year” designed to help struggling high school graduates get back on track academically and prepare for college and careers. 

“Gap years are oftentimes known for serving as a time for exploration for more advantaged kids,” she said. “Let’s change that.”

The idea is still in development, she said, but could be developed quickly.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to get going,” she said.

While high school graduation rates are rising, the researchers said, so is grade inflation — 90% of parents believe their child is actually above grade level in reading and math, according to a March 2023 , making it likely that many students are exiting the K-12 system unprepared for college and careers.

Outside experts who study education systems and secondary education said CRPE’s alarm over the data is justified.

“There’s going to be a long tail of the pandemic,” said Robert Balfanz, a scholar who studies high school as co-director of the at Johns Hopkins University.

He said a key problem from the pandemic is that many students were forced into virtual learning at key points in their education: while making the leap to more challenging reading, for instance, or diving into Algebra or calculus. “Kids that miss core transitional learning, I think, are almost hit twice,” he said. “They have that same amount of learning loss. But you could argue in some ways it was even more strategic of a loss because those are such key building blocks.”

He noted that the best predictor of whether a student will earn a college degree is if they earned “decent grades in challenging courses.” But if they don’t get access to these or don’t learn foundational material, “that’s a problem.”

Unequal access to such coursework, Balfanz said, can push students out of advanced classes. 

He is concerned that during the pandemic, many students who “officially took calculus” or other advanced courses virtually may not have gotten all of the material required. “And those kids are probably already in college.”

In the paper, researchers lamented that our K-12 system “leaves to chance” nearly every aspect of the transition from high school to college and careers, from students discovering their interests and talents to selecting a career pathway aligned to them. 

And few students ever get guidance on how to change careers and find new training or postsecondary opportunities when their interests and priorities shift.

Balfanz said the decline in “postsecondary momentum” could be the result of many factors, including the high cost of college, students who don’t feel well-prepared and a labor market that holds many opportunities for high wages without a college degree.

“I think a combination of those factors is going to push some kids to delay post-secondary,” he said. “And the more you delay it, the odds of success are less.”

Trying to go back to school at that point, he said, is “always challenging.” 

A new kind of report card

Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research () at the American Institutes for Research, said COVID recovery “has not fully happened” in many schools. 

“I’m not feeling super optimistic about pandemic recovery writ large right now,” he said. 

The new CRPE report, he said, demonstrates the “real conundrum” that schools face in communicating with parents: “I think that schools need to convey in more plain English where kids are at,” he said. 

But he said results from large-scale standardized exams “don’t resonate the way that information about their own students would resonate. What we need is for school systems to just be really clear with individual families about when their students are struggling. And I don’t think that school systems typically do that.”

Educators, he said, are typically optimistic about students’ chances of bouncing back — and fearful of being blamed for kids’ academic problems. 

“Schools don’t have a ton of incentive to communicate in ways that might negatively bounce back to them,” he said.

Lake, the CRPE director, said one good way to fix this problem is simply to rethink report cards.

“Parents look to report cards first,” she said. “And report cards need to be able to say how the kids are actually doing — not just that they’re getting a particular grade. Are they mastering the skills that they need to graduate? Are they on track? And so that’s where I’d focus my efforts.”

Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.