Hello from Erica on Chalkbeat’s national desk. This week’s big story is a bit wonky, but it describes an issue that could increasingly shape — or distort — our conversation about student achievement as more American students take advantage of school choice programs. 

We also take stock of the Education Department one year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle it, check in on Chicago’s CEO search, and more.

And if you need a reward to make it to the end of this newsletter, there’s a rutabaga waiting for you.

There’s a big change happening in American education. With help from vouchers and education savings accounts, more students are attending school outside the public school system.

That means the National Assessment of Educational Progress, considered the nation’s report card, risks becoming less representative of the nation’s students.

The core reading and math tests are given every two years to a representative sample of roughly half a million students. Private school students — with the notable exception of Catholic school students — have been underrepresented in that sample for years. Unlike public schools, private schools aren’t required by law to participate. 

Private schools’ low participation means their results haven’t been reported separately even at the national level for years. But the stakes of that undersampling are higher now. 

Consider what happened in Florida when the 2024 results showed that state’s students posting their lowest scores in 20 years. 

Then-Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. blamed the decline, in part, on NAEP not including private school students.

“This issue only stands to grow, as Florida has chosen a path that puts students and families before teachers unions and provides universal school choice,” Diaz wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, before concluding with a call to “make NAEP great once again.”

These kinds of disputes over the validity of results could become more common, independent researchers and NAEP governing board members told Chalkbeat. 

Martin West, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, called this information gap “the most significant challenge facing the NAEP program in the medium term.”

Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and education researcher, put it more colorfully.

“If NAEP is the nation’s report card, then questions about private school achievement will become the dog that ate the homework,” he said. “It will be a source of evasions and spin.”

Read the full story here.

Conservative activists want to simplify state math standards. The National Association of Scholars says Common Core standards are confusing and lack rigor. South Dakota could soon adopt the organization’s Archimedes math standards, according to the Hechinger Report. These call for more memorization of math facts and significantly pare down descriptions of what students should know. Some math teachers worry that important details will be lost.

How strong is the case against ed tech? One neurologist and education consultant’s U.S. Senate testimony tying poor test scores to the use of screens in schools has gone viral. There’s no actual smoking gun in the research base, but there are still reasons for concern.

Friday marks the anniversary of President Donald Trump signing an executive order that instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” and return education to the states to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

A year later, there is still an Education Department. But things are hardly business as usual.

The department has used a series of interagency agreements to transfer core functions to the departments of Labor, Interior, and Health and Human Services. The idea is that show that the Education Department is just a pass-through agency whose primary function — distributing money — can be performed anywhere in the federal government. 

How well this is going depends on whom you ask. There were numerous reports of disruptions and glitches as career-technical education, the first office to move, transitioned to Labor. Notably, the department has not — yet! — moved forward with the most controversial and contested proposed change: moving special education oversight to Health and Human Services.

Congress, which ultimately would need to vote to get rid of the department, has not had much to say about these changes, aside from some nonbinding language that didn’t halt additional interagency agreements. 

But Congress has largely rejected the Trump administration’s recommended budget cuts, instead keeping funding for most programs flat. 

The Education Department has also moved cautiously when it comes to state requests to be exempted from federal rules and regulations. The waiver request federal officials ultimately approved in Iowa was much more modest than state education leaders originally requested. Other waiver requests remain under review. 

“It is not the wild, Wild West out there,” Kirsten Baesler, the assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, told Education Week.

Changes have been much more noticeable in the Office for Civil Rights, but as our colleague Matt Barnum noted, these changes may not feel like “returning education to the states.” Advocacy groups report that many civil rights cases have stalled after deep staffing cuts, while the office has pursued cases related to transgender bathroom access and sports participation and Native American sports mascots. These issues previously were a matter of state and local policy. 

Conservative education commentator Rick Hess called the last year a “Rorschach test” for conservatives and progressives alike. Are these changes substantive and meaningful? Or largely symbolic? Hess argues the impact on students and teachers has been pretty minor. 

What do you think? Let us know by replying to this email or writing to [email protected].

That’s the learning gap that opened up between the bottom 10% and the top 90% of fourth grade students on the NAEP exam between 2005 and 2024, according to new research. This gap ballooned in the aftermath of the pandemic and has become a growing source of concern in education policy. 

But this paper found that the gap has been widening for a long time, especially in public and Catholic schools. Charter schools and Department of Defense schools performed much better. 

​​“By definition, there will always be a gap between the students performing at the 90th percentile and students performing at the 10th percentile,” Patrick Wolf, an economist at the University of Arkansas and a study co-author, told the 74. “But we don’t want it to be wide, and we don’t want it to be getting wider.” 

That was Colorado teacher Sabra Sowell-Lovejoy, who teaches social studies, English, and food production in a 38-student rural school district. Students learn how to grow and prepare food, freeze summer produce for winter consumption, and manage water scarcity. Sowell-Lovejoy told Chalkbeat her students have never tried a food and ended up not liking it.

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