Beyond Decoding NAEP: The Federal Role in Promoting Efficacy, Equity, & Accountability

This session picked up on our 8-session series from earlier this year that focused on “Decoding NAEP” where we engaged state chiefs, educators, parents, researchers, and advocates in a deep-dive exploration of the 2024 scores from “The Nation’s Report Card.” We went beyond decoding NAEP in this session to explore the federal role in generating data that is needed to assess student progress and the will needed from local, state, and national leaders to regain a focus on the importance of student outcomes. We explored why it is so important for the U.S. Department of Education and its Institute of Education Sciences to continue to provide funding and support for research that reveals what is needed and what works for various student demographics.

Moderator and CGLR Chief Learning Officer Sarah Torian launched the discussion by engaging with two former U.S. Secretaries of Education, representing both sides of the aisle, about the importance of federal leadership being committed to student outcomes. John King, Jr., J.D., Ed.D., Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY) and U.S. Secretary of Education under President Obama from 2015–2017, and Margaret Spellings, President and CEOof the Bipartisan Policy Center and U.S. Secretary of Education under President Bush from 2005–2009, discussed the historical context, going back to President Lyndon Johnson in the sixties, where elected officials have always held the notion that federal leadership is needed to make sure we are holding ourselves accountable for the needs of every single student, irrespective of condition, ZIP code, or other modifier.

King emphasized the connection between educational outcomes and a healthy workforce and the importance of federal leaders making this connection a priority:

And at the end of the day, for every employer, they will not have the workforce we need if we do not provide students with the foundational skills, particularly in English and math, although obviously students need much more than that. But if they don’t have those things, they surely aren’t going to be successful in the workforce.….Today we really need our leadership to step up and restore the sense that improving educational outcomes is a national imperative.

Torian continued the robust conversation on the federal role in promoting efficacy and accountability with three prominent research and education leaders who also offered perspectives from both sides of the aisle. Michael J. Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Adam Gamoran, Ph.D., of the William T. Grant Foundation, and Ruth N. Lopez Turley, Ph.D., of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and former member of the National Board for Education Sciences (2022–2025) reacted to what the former Secretaries shared. They emphasized the importance of national research and data to identify and address inequities that impede student progress.

Turley explained how federal data is used at the local level in her home community of Houston:    

We were using national-level data from the School Finance Indicators Database, which uses the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, census data, etc., to develop estimates for how much per-pupil funding is needed for each school district across the country. So we found that most school districts in the state of Texas are underfunded in terms of what they would need to achieve national average test scores. But even more importantly, we found that there are some school districts that were severely underfunded relative to others, both in the region and in the state. And so there are huge inequities that we need to pay attention to [and the federal data is needed to identify these inequities].

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