One month ago NJ Education Report reported that seven state education departments had not released statewide standardized assessment scores for school year 2023-2024: Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and New Jersey. This matters.  As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation says, “when states are slow to release test scores, it implies that these data are unimportant,” the wrong message to send to the public because “this data can help policymakers make decisions on education spending, help teachers develop an accurate picture of their students’ progress, and help parents understand whether their child needs additional academic support.”

Let’s see how transparency has progressed among these seven laggard states.

• Arkansas released 2024 statewide test results on October 16th.

• Illinois released 2024 statewide test results on October 30th.

• Maine will release 2024 statewide test results on December 3d.

• Nebraska will release 2024 statewide test results by the end of November.

• Pennsylvania will release 2024 statewide test results by the end of November.

• South Dakota released 2024 statewide test results on October 21st.

How about New Jersey, where last year the state Department of Education waited until December 6th, eight months after students took completed the federally-mandated annual assessments, to reveal statewide proficiency rates?

The NJ DOE releases statewide test results at State Board public meetings The next meeting is December 4th, two weeks from now. If Maine, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania release their scores as scheduled, this will leave NJ in the unenviable slot of withholding information about statewide progress longer than any other state in America. (In an emailed response to a request for comment, the DOE said it “plans to publicly release statewide results in due course.”)

Why do some states wait so long to release results from standardized tests taken in April and May, even though the information is available far earlier? (In NJ school district get results in September and parents get individual student reports in October.) Why withhold stakeholders’ ability to gauge statewide student learning?

Education analyst Chad Aldeman says these inexcusable delays are “mostly a function of political processes.” States, he explains, “have configured their testing systems more as a compliance exercise in response to the federal testing mandate, at the expense of timely and actionable information to parents and educators.”

Paige Kowalski, the executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign,  agrees that these delays are a kind of political gamesmanship: “If the delay goes past [October], we might have a fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem, where we’re asking leaders to do something against their own interest,”  like publicly acknowledging less-than-stellar proficiency rates among students. 

“I don’t know why every media outlet in the country isn’t outraged. It’s insane to me,” Kowalski added. “You routinely see certain states wait all the way until December. This is intentional. It isn’t accidental, and it’s not a lack of resources, and it’s insulting.”