The National Assessment Government Board made some very good news last week, albeit a decade or two late, when it voted to commence more frequent testing of civics and, especially, to make 12th grade results available at the state level.
The National Assessment Government Board made some very good news last week, albeit a decade or two late, when it voted to commence more frequent testing of civics and, especially, to make 12th grade results available (in civics, reading, and math) at the state level.
Let me underscore it: state-level NAEP results for 12th graders. Finally! Data at the end of high school on how much the young people of a state know and can do in key subjects.
Though NAEP has been testing 4th, 8th, and 12th graders in most subjects for decades, with rare exception (see below) the 12th grade results have been reported only for the nation as a whole, making it impossible for state leaders to know how their high school seniors are doing on these respected benchmark assessments when compared with the country and with other states.
In recent years, in fact, NAEP has sometime skipped 12th grade altogether—partly for budgetary reasons as Congress requires (ever since NCLB) that state-level results be provided for reading and math every two years in grades 4 and 8, which has sopped up much of the NAEP appropriation. Civics, for example, has not been tested at all at the 12th grade level since 2010.
Crazy, yes, considering that most kids’ deepest exposure to civics—if any—comes during high school, during which the majority of states (36 at last count, plus D.C.) require them to take at least a half-year course in the subject.
Twelfth grade obviously represents the end of K–12, the transition from compulsory state-provided education to the dizzying array of options that young people then pursue, often including college but often, too, directly into the workplace, the military, or (pathetically) their parents’ basements.
One should expect state leaders to be obsessed with how well their students are prepared for what follows—and many do seem interested, but NAEP has been no help.
For a very long time I’ve been pushing to change this. Back in 2018, I wrote that “The single best thing that could happen to American education in the next few years would be for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to begin regularly reporting state-by-state results at the 12th-grade level.”
It seemed obvious:
Even as they write “college and career readiness” rates into their ESSA plans, many states have no reliable way to determine how many of their high school seniors are reaching that point and, regardless of what they use for standards and tests, practically none will be able to make valid comparisons with other states.
Were NAEP to supply state-level 12th grade results, I argued, it would:
…give participating states a valid and reliable metric for how many of their students are truly college-ready at the end of high school. Because NAEP is based on a sample, it would discourage the kinds of test prep, credit recovery, grade changing, and rate faking that afflict graduation data—and that often afflict state assessments. (Because NAEP employs just a sample of students and schools, it also means less curricular distortion and pressure on teachers.) And it would enable state leaders to see precisely how their twelfth graders are doing when compared with other states and with the country as a whole.
This was not, in fact, a new idea. NCES had experimented with state-level 12th grade results in 2009 and again in 2013. It was optional for states, and just 11 volunteered, but those that did learned a ton about their education system and their students. Massachusetts, for example, learned that while its 12th graders overall scored higher than the nation as a whole—43 percent were “at or above proficient” in reading while the country was at 36 percent—huge gaps remained between its White and Asian students, on the one hand, and its Black and Hispanic youngsters on the other.
I don’t know why this experiment didn’t continue after 2013, whether it was budgetary, political, or simply the lack of demand from states. It’s not hard to think of reasons that some jurisdictions might pass on the opportunity. (“Too much testing.” “Nothing we can do about it after 12th grade.” “Results might be embarrassing.” “Kids won’t take it seriously in the spring of their senior years.”)
Pause on that last concern, which is plausible on its face. NAEP is a no-stakes tests for those taking it, so why not just “bubble in” one’s non-answers, especially if graduation is around the corner? Back before DOGE defenestrated the National Center for Education Statistics, the NAEP team there did some serious investigation into this concern and concluded that the 12th grade NAEP data are valid, cautiously reporting (in 2017) that:
…most 12th-grade students participate in and are engaged when taking NAEP assessments. Student response rate percentages are in the mid-90s, off-task and nonresponse rates are low, and most schools have found that simple techniques (such as a thank-you or certificate of participation) are enough to encourage students to participate.
This will be a continuing concern, of course, as will the relevance of 12th grade NAEP results to the growing number of kids emerging from CTE programs and headed in directions other than traditional college. Research sponsored by NAGB has shown clear links between NAEP scores and college readiness, but (to my knowledge) not much is known about NAEP in relation to workplace preparation. It stands to reason, however, that every American adult who seeks to earn a decent living should be reasonably proficient in reading and math—and it’s certainly true that good citizenship will benefit from some understanding of civics.
It took NAGB longer than it should have to get to this point, but the Board made the right decision last week and now we’ll see how many states really want these data. Unlike 4th and 8th grade reading and math, which all states must participate in if they want to receive Title I funding, the new state-level reports will (once again) be optional for states—though free for those that opt in. State leaders have until January to declare their intention to take part in the 2028 round of 12th grade reading and math assessment, as well as 8th grade civics. Then comes state-level 8th grade science in 2029. Unfortunately, the 12th grade civics option doesn’t arise until distant 2032.
The ed-reform community, if it’s on the ball, as well as business leaders, civil rights groups, and others, should press their state leaders to sign up ASAP. Congress ultimately holds the purse strings and will want to see evidence of appetite for these important data.
In the meantime, kudos to NAGB for creating the opportunity. They should have done it a decade ago—and Congress should have included 12th grade in the NCLB mandate a quarter century back—but, as I said, better late than never.
From Oklahoma to California, states across the political spectrum are moving to require minimum amounts of daily recess in elementary—and in some cases middle—grades, often coupled with bans on withholding it as punishment. At first glance, these laws seem like a no-brainer. In an era of anxious, screen-saturated childhoods, guaranteeing more unstructured play and time to decompress feels like a policy lever that addresses multiple concerns at once. But that intuition misses a basic constraint: The school day is finite and zero sum, so any additional recess displaces other parts of the schedule. What’s more, the quality of recess matters far more than the quantity, and many of these laws overlook the conditions that determine whether the time is constructive, chaotic, or somewhere in between.
Schools already operate under significant time constraints. Districts routinely lament that there is not enough instructional time in the day to adequately cover a full range of content areas. It is difficult to imagine reading or math being cut, especially in the wake of continued concerns about lagging student achievement. That leaves other subjects—namely social studies, science, or the arts—as the more likely sources of adjustment. Alternatively, schools could extend the school day, but that approach would carry fiscal costs and would likely face significant political hurdles. Put simply, it is easy to add requirements to schools, but far harder to account for what must be taken away to accommodate them.
Recess is not uniform. In some schools, it is well supervised and thoughtfully designed to promote physical movement and healthy peer interaction. In others, it is disorganized free time where conflicts routinely emerge and adults struggle to maintain order. When I ran a high-performing charter school in the early aughts, our team avoided the word recess altogether. Instead, we had “daily exercise,” and the difference was more than semantic. Staff were trained to treat the time as structured physical activity rather than a free-for-all. Students exercised, played games, and blew off steam within a framework designed for safety and positive interactions.
Earlier in my career, by contrast, when I served as an assistant principal at a large urban K–8 school in California, many of the most serious disciplinary incidents occurred during recess. Hundreds of students were spread across a playground, with limited supervision and constant demands on staff from emerging conflicts—to say nothing of inclement weather days and the euphemism known as “indoor recess.” In such a setting, recess can quickly become less of a developmental opportunity than an exercise in crowd control. It was easily the most difficult part of the day to supervise effectively, and a cautionary example that simply adding more recess time does not automatically produce better outcomes.
Even proponents of recess acknowledge how uneven it can be. As The Hechinger Report has noted, recess is, for some students, the hardest part of the day:
“Students may come back from recess feeling dissatisfied … feeling excluded,” said Rebecca London, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of the book “Rethinking Recess,” … “We can’t just say, ‘Throw everyone out in the rec yard with a couple of balls’…There has to be an intentionality as to how we set our recess up to serve the needs of children.”
What matters is not how many minutes are allocated to recess, but how it is designed and plays out in practice. The evidence suggests that adult engagement, the availability and inclusivity of games, and students’ ability to resolve conflict constructively are prerequisites for whether recess becomes a worthwhile experience.
Some advocates argue that recess is valuable precisely because it is unstructured—that children develop resilience and social competence by navigating its unpredictability. In that sense, recess is sometimes couched in anti-fragile terms: not merely as a break from instruction, but as a setting in which children toughen up by navigating disorder. That framing has intuitive appeal. But it does not resolve the central policy question. Even if those developmental benefits depend on a degree of openness and variability, it is unclear whether mandating recess reliably produces them or whether the instructional time it displaces is worth the tradeoff.
Part of the appeal of recess mandates is that they translate a complex set of concerns into something administratively simple. For example, Oklahoma’s new law largely boils down to this provision:
The [State Board of Education] shall require, as a condition of accreditation, that public elementary schools provide to students in full-day kindergarten and grades one through five… forty minutes of recess per school day, which may be divided into two recess periods of twenty minutes each. Recess shall consist of supervised, unstructured time for play. No student shall be prohibited from participating in recess as a form of discipline.
Lawmakers do not have to define what high-quality recess looks like or grapple with school-level variability in culture and capacity. Nor do they have to reckon with how this requirement interacts with other state mandates governing the allocation of instructional time.
The wave of recess mandates also reflects a broader policy pattern. For years, education reformers have argued for moving away from rigid seat-time requirements toward a greater focus on outcomes and mastery. A statutory floor for recess minutes represents a partial reversal of that logic, substituting a specified input—time—for a clear account of how either structured or unstructured recess produces the desired benefits. In an ideal world, the school day might be longer and more flexible, allowing schools to balance competing demands without forcing sacrifices across the curriculum. But if states are intent on legislating in this space, a more productive approach would be to consider the school day in its entirety and recognize that additional recess comes at the expense of other priorities.
Recess can be, and often is, a valuable part of the school day. But a state mandate is a blunt way to attempt to secure it. By locking schools into additional minutes, policymakers risk turning a blind eye to what gets lost in the exchange—and whether those displaced opportunities would have generated greater educational value. That tradeoff is especially consequential given the uneven nature of recess itself. Unfortunately, history and experience suggest that mandates of this kind are unlikely to improve how the school day is used.
It’s commencement season, including for my firstborn son, who graduates high school in less than two weeks. So it’s a good time to check in on the “portrait of a graduate” movement.
If that term is unfamiliar to you, CASEL defines it as:
A holistic look at the skills and competencies students need to master to thrive in work, postsecondary educational opportunities, community, and their personal lives.
Here’s how Education Week’s Libby Stanford put it a few years ago:
Rather than deciding that a student is a successful graduate based on the amount of time they’ve spent in the classroom, the portrait presents a more well-rounded view of what success looks like.
She also offered some examples:
In Kentucky, a successful student is an engaged citizen, critical thinker, effective communicator, empowered learner, creative contributor, and productive collaborator, according to the state’s portrait of a learner.
In South Carolina, successful students should be able to read critically, express ideas, investigate through inquiry, reason quantitatively, use sources, design solutions, learn independently, navigate conflict, lead teams, build networks, sustain wellness, and engage as a citizen, according to the state’s portrait of a graduate competencies.
And in New York, the proposed portrait, which the state’s Board of Regents will vote on in an upcoming meeting, describes a successful graduate as someone who is a critical thinker, innovative problem solver, literate across content areas, culturally competent, social-emotionally competent, an effective communicator, and a global citizen.
These “portraits” are being adopted at both the state and district levels—and surely by individual schools, too.
My question is: Should we applaud this?
On the one hand, these statements affirm what everybody already knows: School is about more than just academic learning, and success in life depends on skills that can’t be easily measured by standardized tests. Indeed, whenever parents are asked about what they want their kids to learn, “life skills” or something similar almost always rises to the top. Call it pragmatism or anti-intellectualism, but this reflects a longstanding strand of American thought and culture, and also common sense.
So perhaps these are harmless exercises just re-stating the obvious.
On the other hand, at a time when grade inflation is rampant, AI is making cheating easier than ever, and student achievement is in the cellar, do we really need another effort to downplay the importance of academic achievement? Even if these portraits take care to communicate “both/and”—as in, both traditional academics and other skills and competencies are important—should we worry that the academic piece will be overlooked?
* * *
But it’s not just the potential crowding out of academics that makes me nervous—especially if states, districts, and schools take these “portraits” seriously. That’s the intention in Arizona, for example, as Chad Gestson wrote in The 74 back in January:
Childcare providers weaving the profile into kindergarten readiness. PK–12 systems embedding it into curriculum, instruction, advising, and accountability. Out-of-school programs reinforcing mindsets, habits, and skills beyond the classroom. Higher education and industry evolving credentials, internships and work-based learning around the same vision. Government agencies and philanthropy aligning policies and investments to this shared north star.
If “portraits of a graduate” aren’t just feel-good visioning exercises, then we’d better pay attention to what they are promoting. Also writing in January, Dan Buck took to Education Next to explain what’s at stake:
These frameworks extend the scope of traditional standards from academic content and skills to personality traits, fundamental beliefs, and patterns of thought. Portraits of a Graduate change the question facing policymakers from “What should we teach our children?” to “What kind of people do we want to create?” In so doing, they extend the goals of schooling from traditional academics to values and character traits. That represents a seismic shift.
In my view, Dan does a masterful job explaining the many reasons why such a shift is problematic. I encourage you to read his entire essay. Among them:
I share those concerns. But I also understand the impulse at work behind this movement. So here’s where I see room for compromise:
We should embrace “portraits of a graduate” for schools of choice but not for states or districts or traditional public schools.
That’s not because I’m pro-school choice (though of course I am), but because schools of choice are intentional communities that parents and educators opt into, unlike traditional neighborhood schools, districts, or states. (Indeed, my son is graduating from a traditional public high school in the D.C. suburbs, and any “portrait” it would develop would either be pablum or would offend some families and their politics, religion, and/or cultural heritage.) As intentional communities, schools of choice can and should make it clear what they value. Which is the only way these portraits will do any good.
Indeed, the best private schools have always been clear about their intention to develop more than just students’ minds. Great charter schools, including what we used to call the “no excuses” ones, also have a clear point of view on the type of people they are working to develop. And that means they aren’t for everyone.
And in that context, a statement like a “portrait of a graduate,” if taken seriously, may in fact do some good. If a school says it wants graduates who “strive for excellence,” for example, then it should regularly celebrate excellence—lauding students who produce academically excellent work, as well as those who demonstrate excellence on the playing field or in the orchestra pit. If “honesty” and “integrity” are core values, then it better be sure that its code of conduct aligns with those aspirations.
But states and school districts, as governmental entities charged with serving everyone, should steer clear of these exercises. State standards can and should identify important skills that students should learn that aren’t explicitly academic, such as in the domains of financial literacy, personal health and fitness, and civic responsibility. (This is, of course, nothing new.)
But only schools of choice should paint portraits of a graduate—at least if we want those portraits to be clear and bright and not just a bunch of watery pastels.
High school graduation season is upon us. Across the U.S., graduation rates are up—whether through grade inflation, credit recovery programs, or genuine persistence—while interest in traditional four-year college attendance wanes. The class of 2026, like other recent graduates, went through their entire K–12 education against a backdrop of “college and career readiness” and a (slightly confusing) parallel push for “college for all.” How has that worked out?
YouScience, an ed-tech company with a college and career readiness platform, set out to assess post-graduation readiness among young adults across the country. They surveyed 1,009 recent high school graduates from the Classes of 2022 through 2025, sharing results in a new report, Diplomas without direction.
The methodological details are scant and, while the report claims to offer a “holistic view of the national educational landscape,” it lacks key particulars like the nature of the sample, specific survey questions, and who conducted the analysis. Even so, the survey responses reveal themes that can spur conversation as education leaders and policymakers around the country debate how to shape the future of high school.
The authors depict many high school graduates as “drifting” without a plan. They attribute this lack of direction to the fact that traditional high school programs center on an aspirational outcome that simply isn’t the destination for most graduates. Fewer high school graduates are seeking out traditional four-year degrees (37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2023), and 69 percent of high school graduates say they are not confident about their next steps. Even the students on a defined, traditional pathway like a four-year degree program report lacking confidence in their preparedness for the future (41 percent of females; 36 percent of male respondents).
The report lacks specificity as to what “the future” means (do any of us really know?), but the authors suggest that disengagement relates to a lack of understanding about how high school studies connect with future careers. With recent headlines like, “Will A.I. make college obsolete?” and “Congress is doing little to prepare for potential A.I. job losses,” a bit of unease is understandable, even responsible, on the students’ part. Still, the uncertainty does not absolve schools of the responsibility to keep students engaged in the present.
Students feeling like their coursework lacks relevance is hardly a new phenomenon, but it’s difficult to prepare the next generation for jobs that we don’t yet understand. The class of 2026 started high school before the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Depending on your perspective, the breathtaking pace of change during their teenage years is exhilarating, terrifying, or both. The survey responses reveal that students pursuing careers in the trades and similar technical work seem less concerned about AI-driven disruption than their peers. It’s a logical sentiment—skilled trades are less automatable than white-collar work—but their confidence may mask the downsides that drew previous generations toward the college-for-all mentality in the first place.
When I brought up AI recently with a few college-bound high school seniors, their concerns centered on annoyance about teachers’ careless use of the technology for lesson-planning and grading, not AI taking all the jobs. These soon-to-be graduates in Georgia had access to career-focused learning opportunities through their Title I public high school, including traditional work-study and internships for school credit. According to the YouScience survey, Georgia students report “standout confidence,” in contrast to their peers, particularly those in Western states, where about half of all respondents report low levels of preparedness. The authors describe this as a paradox due to the economic and innovation opportunities in the Western U.S., but I believe it speaks more to state-level policies promoting workforce alignment for students all the way through young adulthood.
The YouScience report goes on to describe how school types produce varied levels of perceived preparedness for the future: Public school students feel the least prepared and least confident among those surveyed, and charter school responses are uneven. The strongest outcomes are among private school students, though this likely reflects socioeconomic advantages as much or more than school programming. No matter how well-designed, I’m skeptical that an online platform like YouScience’s Brightpath program can provide public school students the wraparound, values-aligned, outcome-oriented experience that many private schools aim to deliver. I’m more bullish on schools that incorporate shared expectations, strong community engagement, and formal programs—open to all students—that allow young people to connect classroom learning with real-world experience.
This year’s graduating seniors enter adulthood during a time of extraordinary technological change, and it is unclear which current competencies will align with future economic needs. Offering hands-on experiences in high school, developing school cultures with clear expectations and community engagement, and investing in post-secondary education that bridges young people from youth to adulthood—including traditional college, workforce-aligned training, and public service opportunities—may help boost confidence as these young adults navigate an uncertain future.
SOURCE: YouScience, “Diplomas without direction: 2026 Post-graduation readiness report,” April 2026.
During the 2024–25 school year, more than 8.2 million students participated in high school sports, with varsity athletes representing an important subset of that group. Research shows that participation in high school sports is associated with numerous benefits, including improved engagement, fewer disciplinary issues, stronger peer and adult relationships, a greater sense of belonging, higher educational aspirations, lower rates of risky behaviors, and higher grades, test scores, and class ranks. However, research on the relationship between sports participation and student attendance has received little attention. With attendance playing a key role in student success, sports participation might affect attendance more directly than it affects achievement or graduation, since coaches often require athletes to attend school to participate in practices and meets.
A new study by Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon examined the relationship between sports participation and student attendance to determine whether participation in high school varsity athletics is associated with improved student attendance. This study is timely, as its findings may be informative in the wake of the Covid–19 pandemic–era surge in chronic absenteeism.
To examine this relationship, the researchers used multiple years of student-level, day-by-day attendance data and varsity rosters from the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) for all students in Indiana. These data were merged by the IDOE, providing a de-identified dataset with a final sample of approximately 262,600 high school students in 2024 and approximately 370,200 students and 864,500 student-year observations across the 2021 to 2024 school years. Together, this enabled precise tracking of attendance patterns in that state before, during, and after sports seasons, as well as comparisons between athletes and non-athletes and within-student seasonal variation.
Several notable findings emerged following the researchers’ examination. Most importantly, they found that varsity athletes have substantially better attendance than other students, and chronic absenteeism is far lower among varsity athletes. Athletes are absent less often than their non-athlete peers, and their attendance improves even more during their sports season. Across the school year, athletes’ absence rate was 1.37 percentage points lower than that of non-athletes—a reduction of nearly 20 percent.
This pattern is evident across all sports, where varsity athletes’ absence rate is 0.97 percentage points lower out of season—the athlete effect—and an additional 0.88 points lower in season—the in-season effect. With the average Indiana high school absence rate being 6.54 percent of school days, these effects are large. Taken together, the combined reduction of 1.85 percentage points is especially large. These effects are consistent across multiple model specifications, including models with school and student fixed effects that control for unobservable differences across schools and students.
Sports participation varies across student demographics, but its relationship with attendance is especially strong for female, low-income, and non-white students. Both the athlete and in-season effects are larger for females (1.20 and 1.03 percentage points) than for males (0.77 and 0.81 points), effectively closing the gender gap in absences during the season. The athlete effect is nearly twice as large for low-income students as it is for non-low-income students (1.45 vs. 0.74 points), and the in-season effect is slightly larger, as well (1.00 vs. 0.85). Given higher baseline absence rates among low-income students, it is not surprising that the effects of sports participation are larger in absolute terms.
Similarly, the athlete effect is larger for Black (1.32 points) and Hispanic (1.27) students than for White students (0.90), and smaller for students of other races (0.72). The in-season effect is generally similar across groups, with Black students experiencing a somewhat larger in-season effect (1.02 points) than White students (0.87 points).
Students who participated in multiple varsity-level sports during the year had even lower chronic absenteeism rates than those who played just one sport. The researchers’ models predicted that students who played no sports had a chronic absenteeism rate of 21.7 percent, compared with 15.2 percent for students who played one sport, 11.4 percent for those who played two sports, and 10.0 percent for those who played three sports. This suggests a cumulative relationship between participation and attendance.
Finally, the researchers contend that the relationship between athletic participation and in-season attendance is likely causal. This sharp improvement in attendance during the athletic season suggests more than a correlation. Instead, the researchers argue that participation itself likely drives improved attendance through mechanisms such as eligibility requirements, coach accountability, team expectations, and students’ desire to avoid missing practices or competitions.
Given that varsity athletes consistently have lower absence rates than non-athletes, these findings suggest that athletics could serve as a meaningful lever to address chronic absenteeism. Therefore, policies like expanding access to sports—particularly in schools that serve disadvantaged students—may help reduce absenteeism gaps. Increased participation may also boost students’ motivation, accountability, and sense of belonging, reinforcing daily attendance. Finally, compared to more intensive interventions, varsity athletics may offer a relatively low-cost, scalable approach with social, emotional, and academic benefits for students.
SOURCE: Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon, “An Extra Point for Attendance: The Impact of High School Varsity Athletics on Absenteeism,” American Enterprise Institute (April 2026).
On this week’s solo episode of The Education Gadfly Show, Mike Petrilli discusses President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit, including how it works, why he has concerns about its design, and why he still thinks states, including blue states, should opt in. Could the program help Catholic schools and expand scholarships for low-income families, or will it mostly benefit upper-middle-class parents and well-connected schools?
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines new research on whether full-day pre-K affects English learner identification in elementary school, especially for children from non-English-speaking households.
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