"Despite the best of intentions, however, in practice, reading assessments sometimes negatively impact students and their learning opportunities." Forzani, et al. (2022)

The members of the Development Panel tasked with creating the 2026 NAEP Reading Framework offer cautions at the beginning of their explanation of the politically disrupted drafting process leading to the 2026 NAEP revisions:

Despite the best of intentions, however, in practice, reading assessments sometimes negatively impact students and their learning opportunities, whether the tests themselves exhibit biases or the results are reported in ways that invite stereotyping. This is true even for reading assessments that are not “high stakes” (i.e., have important consequences for individual students), such as the NAEP. Negative consequences of assessment appear to disproportionately impact students from historically marginalized groups, such as students of color (Lee, 2016), multilingual learners (Butvilofsky et al., 2020; Fairbairn & Fox, 2009), and those students whose families are of lower socioeconomic means (Barton & Coley, 2009). (Forzani, et al., 2022, p. 154)

With a revised NAEP being administered in grade 4 and 8 for reading and math in 2026, you can anticipate a refreshed round of crisis mongering to follow, notably in how the results are reported and interpreted.

As Forzani, et al. (2022) explain, NAEP began in 1969, but had a much different purpose then than now:

NAEP was intended to provide a low-stakes, curriculum-independent index of trends in achievement, that is, an assessment with no consequences for individual students, schools, districts, or states and reflecting skills or objectives that could be gained from a wide range of experiences—in or out of school (Wilder et al., 2008). Originally, NAEP was conceptualized to be more like a survey than a test (Jacobsen & Rothstein, 2014). In fact, in its initial years of implementation, scores were reported by individual items (showing the frequency of correct and incorrect responses). There was no plan for all of the items on any NAEP assessment to“add up” to anything like a reading score or a math score. (p. 159)

Over the decades, NAEP evolved, including reading comprehension scores and ways to track reading over time. The 2026 reading framework is the third, following frameworks in 1992 and 2009.

The problems that have developed with the test include that the achievement levels are often misunderstood and misrepresented [“It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments)”], especially in the context of media and political claims of a reading crisis.

For example, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon posted on social media: “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing—it’s the education system that’s failing them.”

In 2018, journalist Emily Hanford popularized the current “reading crisis” in her article “Hard Words,” writing, “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.”

Five years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated that statistic: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”

The problem is that NAEP uses “proficient” for an aspirational level of reading, set at the 70th percentile (Rosenberg, 2004), but NAEP “basic” more closely represents “grade level” proficiency since most states set their grade proficiency at NAEP basic (for example, grade 4 reading):

Thus, the three examples above are high-profile misrepresentations of reading proficiency in the US.

As the current reading crisis driven by the “science of reading” story illustrates, while students have no individual stakes when taking NAEP, those students, teachers, and schools are directly impacted by media and political rhetoric and the legislation and policy that follow misreading and misrepresenting NAEP test scores.

While some may recognize that NAEP has become a significant political cog in the education reform machine, Forzani, et al. (2022) have detailed that the NAEP revision process has also become politically corrupted.

The Development Panel sought to make the test more equitable but also to expand what counts as reading comprehension:

In terms of accounting for students’ assets, the VP advised the DP to focus on a “best foot forward” stance so that all students, including culturally and linguistically diverse children and English learners, had a fair opportunity to demonstrate what they knew and could do. (p. 156)

Here, it is important to understand that all testing requires that some authority determines how to measure learning and which elements of learning constitute what is being measured.

The Development Panel establishes what counts as reading comprehension. Most standardized testing necessarily uses proxies for learning, thus some reading skill or combination of skills stands for the more complex “reading comprehension.”

As an example of how this is a problem, many beginning readers are given “reading” tests that are assessing nonsense words (DIBELS, for example), requiring no meaning making from students (see also in England the use of annual phonic checks).

This is a narrow test of fixed phonics rules, but not a test of reading comprehension.

None the less, since we tend to use standardized testing, most reading tests are heavily focused on measuring discrete reading skills (phonics, vocabulary, etc.), which may or may not correlate strongly with reading comprehension.

More specifically related to the purpose of the article, the Development Panel also details the political and ideological aspects of testing and reading.

As the Panel explains, the 2026 revision process was unusually delayed: “The words ‘small but vocal minority’ of the Board are important to keep in mind; four or five on a Board of 26 members openly opposed, in public Board meetings, adoption of the Framework submitted by the DP” (p. 158).

The interference also included strong conservative resistance to the revisions (including conservative criticism on social media):

As a harbinger of future responses to the Framework, it is noteworthy that conservative Fordham Institute commentator Chester E. Finn published a critique of Draft #3 in a Fordham Institute blogpost (Finn, 2020) between the public ADC meeting in mid-July and the Board meeting on July 31. (p. 165)

Ultimately, the Panel believed the process was significantly and inappropriately compromised:

Although not explicit to the DP, at some point, full consensus had become the goal, and this goal was supported both inside the Board, by its Chair, and externally, by commentators like Finn. What was also clear was that, like the threat of filibuster in the U.S. Senate, consensus is a powerful tool to allow minority rule (in this case a small group of Board members) to control the agenda and the outcome of an important policy matter like the Framework. (p. 169)

Parallel to how media misrepresents NAEP scores, “A firestorm of negative—and generally inaccurate—media stories [about the revised reading framework] appeared in a wide array of outlets including Forbes, the Fordham Institute, The74, and EdWeek” (p. 178).

Forzani, et al. (2022) raise additional concerns about the political and market aspects of NAEP in the context of this disrupted revisions process:

Our nation’s varying opinions about NAEP Reading are evident in the ways the assessment’s results have been explained to the public. Fifty years of NAEP Reading have documented a persistent gap in performance between White students on one side of the gap and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students on the other (NAEP classifications; see, for example, the“Achievement Gaps” page for the website for the National Center for Education Statistics, 2021b). Some have called this an achievement gap, a label that has incited periodic back-to-basics reform efforts, almost since NAEP’s beginnings (e.g., A Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds), movements that have been lucrative to authors and publishers but have not significantly altered NAEP Reading outcomes [emphasis added] (Willis, 2007). (pp. 179-180)

The Panel believes an opportunity was squandered to make NAEP reading a better test of reading comprehension, but they also are skeptical that how NAEP is used will improve: “When interpreting NAEP reading scores in the future, one challenge is that misconceptions prevail about the nature of reading ability; that is, many members of the public—and even some educators—regard reading ability as static and singular rather than as dynamic and multifaceted” (p. 181).

The reality is that standardized testing in the US is a highly political process that, as the Panel notes, will be more “lucrative” to the media, politicians, and the education marketplace than it will serve the needs of our students.