The nation’s report card will skip a few subjects, following sweeping cuts to the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm last month.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only nationally comparable test given periodically to U.S. students, will shrink in scope over the next eight years, representatives from the National Assessment Governing Board announced in a board meeting on Monday. NAGB sets policy for NAEP.
The changes stand to lessen the amount of information the country has on the performance of its students, particularly at the secondary level.
Fourth graders, who were scheduled to take science assessments in 2028 and 2032, will lose the first test, while 12th graders won’t be assessed in the subject at all through 2032. Seniors also won’t take a previously scheduled U.S. history test in 2030; only 8th graders will take the assessment. The writing test, scheduled for 2032, was canceled for all three grades: 4, 8, and 12.
In addition to national results, NAEP also provides state-by-state data in some grades and subjects, as well as data for a collection of large urban districts. Now these state-by-state results won’t be available for 12th graders in reading and math for the next two test administrations, nor for 8th graders taking the 2030 U.S. history test. District results won’t be provided for 8th grade science over the next two test administrations.
NAGB has had to scale down proposed schedules before, but the forces driving this week’s decision are different than they have been in the past, said Martin West, the vice chair of NAGB and a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“When we approved the prior assessment schedule, when we last modified the assessment schedule in 2023, we knew that some of what we included on the schedule would require additional resources beyond what Congress has in recent years appropriated. We expected to be making changes,” West said.
“What’s different here is that the changes we are making are not in response only to congressional appropriations, but also clear signals from the administration of the need to reduce spending.”
The whittling down of the exam schedule comes after President Donald Trump’s administration cut almost the entire staff of the National Center for Education Statistics, the division of the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences that administers NAEP, in mid-March.
At the time, researchers suggested it would be a challenge for NCES to continue testing as scheduled with such reduced capacity.
The Trump administration already canceled one portion of an upcoming NAEP administration in February—the test that has measured the math and reading skills of 17-year-olds for more than 50 years. Known as the long-term trend assessment, the test is designed to allow for comparisons over time. (The other portions of the long-term trend assessment, for 9- and 13-year-olds, remain active.)
The cuts come just days after a statement from U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who on April 17 promised that the 2026 results would go forward and that the department “will ensure that NAEP continues to provide invaluable data on learning across the U.S.” She called NAEP a “critical tool for parents, educators, and experts to assess our students’ preparedness and advise on necessary interventions.”
The 2026 tests will continue as planned with no changes.
“I’m glad that the core parts of NAEP remain in place,” Sean Reardon, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, said in an email, referencing the national, state, and district results in 4th and 8th grade reading and math.
“While these cuts will limit our understanding of how well our students are doing in high school and in other subjects, the more important concern is that NCES no longer has the staff expertise needed to make sure the core parts of NAEP are conducted with the level of rigor, reliability, consistency, and validity that has been the hallmark of NAEP for decades,” he said.
Twelfth graders won’t take science, history tests until after 2032
As the Trump administration has slashed programs, canceled grants, and conducted mass reductions in force at the Education Department, researchers, educational measurement experts, and school officials have emphasized the importance of education data collection, including NAEP—and issued calls for it to be protected amid upheaval.
In a March 26 letter to Senate and House leadership, the heads of 12 education research associations called on Congress to act “to protect the nation’s education data, research infrastructure, and knowledge base,” referencing NAEP as a tool to collect “critical data that identify trends, patterns, and disparities in education.”
The recently updated test schedule doesn’t affect legislatively mandated reading or math tests in grades 4 and 8—the most regularly assessed subjects and grade levels, and the data most frequently cited when politicians and pundits discuss student achievement.
But the changes do eliminate history and science tests for 12th graders through 2032, and cancel state-by-state reporting for 12th graders in reading and math through that time period as well.
The 12th grade results aren’t usually received with as much fanfare as those of 4th and 8th graders, in part because some observers don’t put as much stock in them—arguing that high school seniors, on their way to college or career, don’t take the test that seriously.
Still, reading and math results for 12th graders in recent years have shown similar trends as findings for their younger counterparts, revealing widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students.
The latest 12th grade NAEP in reading and math, administered in 2019, found that about 1 in 3 students met standards for “proficient” in reading, and fewer than 1 in 4 met the same in math.
Losing state-by-state data in these subjects might compromise the field’s ability to understand where and how progress is being made, said Kyle Hartung, an associate vice president in the education practice at Jobs for the Future, an organization that advocates for stronger connections between education and the workforce.
“It would be very hard to start to ask good questions about what we might be able to do differently, and why that might matter,” Hartung said.
It’s unclear if the tests and data reporting cut this week will be reinstated in the future, West said.
“We are making these changes not because we don’t see value in the information, the assessment provided, but because of the need to reduce costs,” West said. “In the future, if we’re able either to become more efficient, or to gain access to additional resources, we would welcome the opportunity to restore the tests that we cut today as well as others.”
