The U.S. Department of Education has abruptly canceled a national test of 17-year-olds after saying just last week that its recent round of cuts would not impact the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
One of three long-term studies that has measured student performance in math and reading since the 1970s, the assessment was set to begin in March and run through May.
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But Westat, a research organization handling the assessment for the National Center for Education Statistics, notified state officials Wednesday that the department had canceled the test.
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“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in the email, which was shared with The 74. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”
A long-term trend assessment of 13 year olds was conducted last fall. The age 9 administration is currently underway through March 14 and will continue. Age 17 data, however, hasn’t been collected since 2012, creating a significant gap in understanding older students’ academic performance.
The tests, which are mandated by law, were set to be administered during the 2019-20 school year, but were canceled due to the COVID outbtreak.
This year’s data would have set a new baseline for understanding how older students are recovering “from pandemic-era learning losses,” said Andrew Ho, an assessment expert at Harvard University and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP.
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The cancellation, he said, could undermine the nation’s trust in the assessment program.
“This is just the first direct evidence that executive actions have weakened NAEP and its ‘gold standard’ infrastructure for monitoring educational progress.”
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Every two years, NAEP tests fourth and eighth graders in math and reading. While results from 12th graders, collected last year, are expected this summer, they won’t be tested again until 2028.
“NAEP’s biggest gaps already are at the end of high school, telling us what kids do [or] don’t know and can [or] can’t do as they prepare to enter the real world,” said Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former chair of the board. The long-term trend study has “helped fill the gap.”
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The move contradicts what department officials said last week when they canceled nearly $900 million in contracts for the Institute of Education Sciences, which includes NCES and NAEP. Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, said at the time that work related to NAEP would not be canceled.
But Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues to cancel contracts it deems either wasteful or contrary to President Donald Trump’s executive order related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The fact that the test was not administered in 2016 or 2020 “does not make it a very effective longitudinal study,” Biedermann told The 74 Thursday. She did not indicate whether it would be rescheduled.
The department has also canceled a contract for conducting background checks on field staff who administer NAEP tests in schools. Biedermann did not provide details on the vendor or the amount of the contract.
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“We’re going to try to re-scope and re-evaluate these contracts,” she said. If they are “absolutely necessary,” they will be re-bid, she said. “A lot of these contracts, in our evaluation, are not cost effective and not meeting the standards.”
Biedermann maintained that the core NAEP program in fourth and eighth grade reading and math “is not being touched.”
Results released last month showed that students continue to lose ground in reading. Eighth grade results in math were flat, and while fourth graders saw gains in math, those results were driven by the highest-performing students.
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The long-term trend program is different from the primary NAEP assessment because it has tested students on essentially the same items for over 50 years.
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“It’s important that we have the long-term trend because of the consistency of the test,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research. Measuring performance on the same test items allows officials to monitor changes across generations.
He added that at least the results from 12th graders, collected last year, will provide “information about how kids are doing at the end of high school.”
The 74’s Senior Writer Greg Toppo contributed to this report.
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