Governors have no shortage of ideas about how to improve education. But before deciding what to change, they need an honest answer to a more basic question: How are our students doing?
That sounds simple. It isn’t.
We governed Tennessee at different times and from different political parties. But we learned the same lesson: you cannot improve what you are unwilling to measure honestly.
Governors will get the chance to see how students in their state are doing in a critical,often-overlooked subject: civics. But they have to sign up by the end of January to get state-level results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics assessment, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, or NAEP.
For newly elected governors, that will mean making a quick decision shortly after taking office. It shouldn’t be a hard one, though.
U.S. students get limited instruction, particularly in early grades, about how our government works, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and how to apply civics knowledge beyond the classroom. Governors can help change that by prioritizing and measuring what students know and can do in civics.
What we know now is limited but concerning: only 1 in 5 eighth graders in U.S. schools reached the NAEP Proficient level on the most recent Nation's Report Card in civics, meaning the vast majority of students likely struggle to identify the separation of powers and checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution.
Unlike in subjects like reading and math, we don't have state-specific information about how our own students are doing compared to students in other states in civics. That puts leaders at a disadvantage when trying to improve schools and communities and help young people develop the civic knowledge and skills they need to excel academically, in the workforce, and in their communities.
But beginning in 2028, if they meet the January deadline, states can get state-specific results in eighth-grade civics rather than just national averages. Tennessee's academic progress over the past two decades serves as an example of why all states should capitalize on this opportunity. In 2007, Tennessee’s extremely low Nation's Report Card scores in reading and math, which contradicted our own state assessment results, served as a wake-up call. Our state got to work raising K-12 expectations, increasing the rigor of our end-of-year state tests, and improving classroom practices.
The strategy worked: Between 2011 and 2015, Tennessee became the fastest-improving state on NAEP. And progress continues. Recently, for the first time, the state ranked in the top quarter of states for reading and math achievement.
This is why we believe NAEP is a particularly valuable tool. It’s considered the gold standard in assessments and is the only common yardstick that measures student learning across the country. It lets us know whether students today are doing better or worse than kids in those same grades did two years or two decades ago and how students in our state are doing compared to other states.
We didn't always have the benefit of state-level NAEP results. NAEP didn’t produce any state-specific data at all until the 1980s, when Tennessee joined other southern states in a pilot program to determine whether valid state results could be obtained from NAEP data. That paved the way toward a federal requirement 25 years ago that results for all 50 states in 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math be reported publicly.
That was a win for states and kids. But today, we have to ask ourselves, what about those other essential things that children learn in school besides reading and math?
States now have an opportunity to answer that question in civics. We hope they'll take it. We know from experience how valuable it is to have an honest, independent measure of how students are doing. Good policy requires good information. And good leadership requires being willing to confront what that information tells us.