When Schools Try to Cover Up Their Failures

Social promotion and efforts to ban standardized tests are ways of shielding adults from accountability.If you stare really hard—and maybe squint—at last week’s federal report on long-term K-12 education trends in the U.S., there is some good news. Math and reading scores among 9-year-olds have improved a little since 2022, and most of the gains were driven by struggling students. It’s a signal that those in the youngest cohort of test takers are recovering from the disastrous pandemic school closures. The good news pretty much ends there. Among 13-year-olds in nearly every demographic group, test scores in math and reading...