Giving Compass' Take:

· Before ESSA, the US government incentivized higher standards for students through monetary compensation. Now, the 74 reports that the "honesty gap" is growing and student success is falling due to low standards and a lack of Common Core encouragement. 

· Are test scores really an accurate representation of knowledge? Nonprofits involved in education initiatives should think about the way they are emphasized.

· Read more about the future of testing in schools.

States are setting higher expectations for student academic performance, according to a new report in the journal Education Next. The authors find that proficiency standards on state tests have grown more stringent over the past few years, defying worries that they would be dumbed down as the federal government took a more detached approach to school accountability. But higher standards don’t seem to have yielded higher performance.

Since 2005, the journal has regularly measured the percentage of students rated as “proficient” — i.e., on track for college — on their respective states’ standardized tests. That proportion is then compared with the percentage rated proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a rigorous test seen as the gold standard among education experts. If states set their proficiency bar high, the difference between their own tests and NAEP should be small.

For years, those disparities were instead gaping. In 2009, the difference was 37 percentage points on average. Because so many states set low standards for student performance, millions of parents believed that their own children were well prepared for life after high school, when according to NAEP, they were actually falling behind. The phenomenon was known as the “honesty gap.”

That all changed after 2009, when the Department of Education under President Obama offered financial incentives to states to adopt the Common Core State Standards (or else design local versions derived from them). Over the past decade, as dozens of states have lifted their own proficiency standards, the honesty gap has shrunk by about three-quarters.

But then the Common Core proved politically radioactive as a coalition of teachers unions, anti-testing parents, and conservative activists pushed to eliminate them. After the passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which explicitly barred the federal government from incentivizing states to alter their academic standards, some feared that state standards would once again be weakened. After all, with a lower bar comes more students who can vault over it (and more happy news reports about improved performance).

Read the full article about education standards and test scores by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.