Center for Assessment

Sometimes I feel like I’m yelling into the void. I’ve been concerned about grading practices for more than 30 years, and now I read about South Carolina’s new law banning “grading floors.” But this post isn’t about South Carolina; It’s about ideas that won’t die despite standing on technical quicksand. First, a quick refresher: Grading floors are policies that require teachers to assign a non-zero minimum grade (e.g., 50%) for all assignments.

Texas recently announced new required-reading lists: specific texts for each grade. To say the readings have received a lot of attention is an understatement. This is largely because they include Bible passages. Like many, I have concerns about the Eurocentric nature of the required readings, but I’m not writing to debate the Texas list. I want to talk about the merits of creating specific or general reading lists as a way to improve large-scale reading tests.

At the Center, we design surveys pretty regularly,  typically to support client outreach for program evaluation or strategy development. In this blog, I explore where generative AI can help in survey design, implementation, and reporting and where human expertise remains essential. There is a well-established literature base on best practices in survey development with lots of rich guidance on how to approach this work in general.

The need for high-quality civic learning opportunities in the nation’s K-12 schools is clear, and civic diploma seals have a key role to play: They could serve as one of the multiple sources of evidence that educators and policymakers need to support and gauge students’ civic readiness. Tools to monitor civic learning opportunities and civic readiness are essential to high-quality civic education.

Education leaders are constantly being asked to make coherent decisions in an incoherent environment. I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment terminology and how important nuances get lost in attractive phrasing. And I’m worried that these losses can undermine the clarity we need about the purposes and uses of assessment information.

Education leaders are constantly being asked to make coherent decisions in an incoherent environment. That may sound dramatic, but it describes the daily reality of many who lead large school systems. They are trying to make sense of artificial intelligence, technology and screen-time debates, assessment proliferation, through-year assessment proposals, accountability results, budget constraints, staffing shortages, and public pressure for improvement.

The Reidy Interactive Learning Series will be held Sept. 24-25 in Portsmouth, N.H. Join us! Click here for the agenda and registration information. At the Center, we all take turns organizing our annual conference, the Reidy Interactive Learning Series (RILS). This year it’s our turn, and we faced the daunting challenge of selecting one topic from a long list of important issues. For a variety of reasons, we’ve decided to focus on measuring career readiness.

It’s alive and well: the perennial question of whether school accountability systems measure the right things. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of this genre and have eagerly consumed all the recent entries. But the latest flurry of reflections about accountability largely skips over a couple of important questions, and that oversight is getting in the way of finding good and practical solutions.

There has been a lot of press lately about a learning recession, a term that describes the general decline in academic achievement since about 2013, but the story in reading is different than math. Average reading achievement for elementary, middle, and high schools over the past 35 years, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), looks so flat we could use the trend line to hang a picture.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H. L. Mencken is often credited with this quote, but, ironically, this version of the quote appears to be a simplified paraphrase of the original. That seems fitting. The instinct to simplify things is powerful. That quote came to mind as I read the coverage of the May 2026 Education Scorecard report.