The council did not provide an official explanation for its movements. But Vice-President Martin West, professor of education at Harvard, said in an interview that the cuts were an effort to save the 2026 assessments. “A calculation moment came faster due to the program’s pressures to reduce expenses in real time,” he said.
In other words, the board of directors effectively cut the patient’s appendages to try to save the brain and the heart. Despite the sacrifice, it is still not clear that the gambit will work.
DOGE demanded 50% discounts on the $ 190 million test program a year. Almost all of the work is managed by external entrepreneurs, such as Westat and ETS, and five -year contracts were awarded at the end of 2024. But instead of paying sellers each year, DOGE cut into diced in shorter increments, exerting pressure on entrepreneurs to accept live cuts, according to several former employees of the Department of Education. Currently, several contracts are expected to lack money in May and June, and Doge approval is necessary to restart the flow of money. Indeed, DOGE allowed a NAEP contract to miss all of funds on March 31, forcing ETS employees to stop working on writing new questions for future exams.
Reading and mathematics tests should start to be administered in schools in January 2026, and therefore additional disturbances could completely derail the main evaluation of the NAEP. The NAEP is taken by a sample of 450,000 students who are selected to represent all the students of the fourth and eighth of the students in the country, and each student is not part of a test. This sampling approach avoids the burden of testing each child in the country, but it obliges the entrepreneurs of the Department of Education to carry out complicated statistical calculations for the number of candidates and the number of test sections necessary to produce valid and reliable results. Entrepreneurs must then pack the test sections in virtual test booklets so that students can take online. The education department must also obtain approval from the Federal Office of Management and Budget to start tests in schools – another set of paperwork managed by entrepreneurs.
A DOGE Dilemma
People familiar with the deliberations of the council feared that entrepreneurs could be forced to accept cuts which could harm the quality and validity of the examination itself. Significant changes to the exam or its administration could prevent the achievement of students’ results with the results of 2024, potentially undergoing the entire objective of the evaluation.
The members of the board of directors were finally faced with a dilemma. They could cut the corners over the entire range of assessments or hope to maintain the high quality of the NAEP with a much smaller basket of tests. They chose the latter.
The cuts were designed to comply with the mandates of the congress. Although the evaluation of long -term trends is required by Congress, the law does not stipulate how frequency it must be administered, and therefore the board of directors has postponed it until 2033. Many test experts wondered if this examination has now become redundant that the main NAEP has a history of 35 years of student performance. The Board of Directors has discussed the abolition of this exam since 2017. “Time is raising questions about its continuous value,” said West.
The editorial evaluations, initially planned for 2032 for the years fourth, eight and 12th, required an overhaul and this would have been an expensive and difficult process, in particular with the current debates on what means to teach writing in the AI era.
The loss of results at the level of the state and the district for certain examinations, such as secondary and mathematics, was some of the most painful cuts. The ability to compare students’ results through state lines has been one of the most precious aspects of NAEP tests, as comparison can provide role models to other states and districts.
Cost reduction
“Everyone is suitable that NAEP can be more effective,” said West, who added that the board of directors has been trying to reduce costs for many years. But he said it was difficult to test the changes for future exams without compromising the validity and quality of the current examination. This double path can sometimes add short -term costs.
We did not know how many millions of dollars that the board of directors saved with its evaluation cancellations on Monday, but savings are certainly lower than the 50% reduction that Doge is demanding. The largest cost driver is the main NAEP test, which is being conservation. The contracts are awarded by the task and not by evaluation, and entrepreneurs must therefore return with estimates of the quantity of cancellation of certain examinations will allocate its expenses. For example, now that fourth year science is not administered in 2028, no question should be written for this. But field staff will always have to go to schools that year to administer tests, including reading and mathematics, who have not been cut.
Compare old and new evaluation hours
The external observers have decried the cuts on social networks, a commentator of education saying that the cancellations “began to cut in the muscle”. Science and history, although not mandated by Congress, are important for many. “We have to worry about how our schools teach students the sciences,” said Allison Socol, who directs preschool policy in secondary school in Edtrust, a non -profit organization that advocates equity in education. “Any point of data that you watch shows that future careers will be based strongly on STEM skills.”
Socol is worried that Doge will not be satisfied with the cuts and the requirement of the board of directors. “It’s so much easier to destroy things than to build them,” she said. “And it’s very easy, once you have taken one thing, to take another and the other one and the other.”
On April 17, the Department of Education announced that the NAEP 2026 would occur as planned. But after mass layoffs in March, it is not clear if the ministry has the capacity to supervise the process, because only two employees with NAEP experience are excluded by almost 30 who worked on the test. McMahon may need to rehthe certain employees to carry out it, but the new hiring contradicts the spirit of the executive order of Trump to close the department.
Socol fears that the Trump administration does not really want to measure students’ performance. “There is a very clear push of the administration, not only in the education sector, to have much less information on how our public institutions serve the inhabitants of this country,” said Socol. “It is much easier to ignore inequality if you cannot see it, and that’s the goal.”
The Department of Education did not answer my questions about their intentions for NAEP. McMahon was very energetic to articulate the value of the evaluations, but it may not have the last word because DOGE must approve the NAEP contracts. “What is very clear is that the secretary’s office does not completely control the Doge,” said a person with knowledge of the dynamics within the Department of Education. “McMahon’s opinions affect Doge’s priorities, but McMahon has no direct control at all.”
The ball is now in Doge’s Court.
* Correction: an earlier version of this sentence said that two administrations of the NAEP long -term trend had been abandoned by the board of directors on April 21. Only the 2029 administration was canceled by the board of directors. The long -term trend of 2025 NAEP for 17 -year -olds was canceled by the Department of Education in February. Students aged nine and 13 had already taken it in April.
Contact the editor Jill presented at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay. 35 on the signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
