For generations, parents had a simple way to judge whether their children were succeeding in school. Report cards came home. Teachers gave feedback. Grades offered a rough sense of whether a student was thriving, struggling, or somewhere in between. An A meant excellent work. A C suggested average performance. A failing grade was a warning sign that help was needed.
That system no longer works the way many parents assume it does.
Today, many American parents believe their children are performing at or above grade level when objective evidence strongly suggests otherwise. The problem is not simply misunderstanding. It is a growing disconnect between what schools signal to parents and what students actually know. Between grade inflation, declining faith in standardized testing, shifting state benchmarks, and a broader anti-testing movement that pushed accountability aside, it has become increasingly difficult for parents to tell how their children are truly doing in school.
The Parent Perception Problem
The numbers behind this problem are startling.
Research cited by PBS NewsHour host Amna Nawaz found that 90 percent of parents believe their children are performing at grade level. Yet standardized testing paints a dramatically different picture. Among eighth graders, only 29 percent were proficient in reading, and just 26 percent were proficient in math. In other words, a massive majority of parents believe their children are doing fine when objective assessments suggest many are not.
The problem becomes even clearer when broken down city by city. Nawaz reported that in Boston, only 30 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading, yet 85 percent of parents believed their children were doing fine. In Houston, reading proficiency stood at 58 percent, while 92 percent of parents thought their children were on track. Sacramento County showed a similar disconnect, with 45 percent proficiency compared with 90 percent of parents believing students were doing adequately.
Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this not merely a “perception gap,” but a “reality gap.”
“It actually breaks my heart,” Duncan said. “Parents are the greatest advocates for their children. They want to see them do well and be successful. But if they don’t know if their child needs more help in reading or more help in math or whatever it might be, they don’t know what to do.”
Parents cannot intervene if they are unknowingly being told everything is fine.
Grade Inflation Hides the Problem
One reason parents struggle to understand student performance is that grades increasingly tell a misleading story.
According to reporting in The New York Times, average high school GPAs rose significantly between 2010 and 2022. Math grades climbed from 3.02 to 3.32 even as national measures of academic performance remained weak. This widening disconnect suggests students are receiving higher grades without necessarily mastering more material.
Research summarized by The 74 found that teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores “often conflict.” Parents tend to trust grades because they are familiar, frequent, and easy to understand. Standardized test scores, by contrast, often appear complicated, filled with percentiles, rankings, and technical comparisons. Ariel Kalil, a University of Chicago public policy professor, explained that test results can feel confusing to parents because they are often presented with “histograms and numbers” and multiple comparison groups.
That confusion matters because grades increasingly mask academic struggles.
One study cited in the supplied material found that nearly 60 percent of grades do not match student test scores. Another University of Texas study reportedly found that grade inflation can reduce future test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment, and lifetime earnings. In effect, inflated grades may provide emotional comfort in the short term while quietly harming students in the long run.
As Derek Rury of Oregon State University bluntly stated, grades are subjective and “you don’t know what you’re getting.” By comparison, “test scores, for all their flaws, are objective.”
The War on Testing and the Push Against Accountability
At the center of this problem sits the anti-testing movement.
For years, critics argued that standardized tests were unfair, culturally biased, stressful, and overly focused on accountability. Teachers unions and education activists often pushed back against testing requirements, arguing that exams consumed instructional time and unfairly judged educators and schools. The supplied material notes common criticisms of standardized tests, including claims that they reflect family income, create pressure, and fail to capture the full picture of student learning.
Yet the consequences of weakening testing may now be impossible to ignore.
If objective testing is weakened or dismissed, what remains? Parents are left with report cards, teacher feedback, and school messaging, all of which may be shaped by subjective grading standards and institutional incentives. Schools understandably prefer positive stories to negative headlines. Teachers rarely want classrooms publicly identified as underperforming. Administrators do not want schools labeled failures.
This creates an uncomfortable question: if teachers and school systems resist independent measurements of student success, what exactly replaces accountability?
Supporters of testing argue that standardized assessments provide one of the few objective checks on academic progress. Victoria McDougald of the Fordham Institute described tests as an essential counterweight to grade inflation, noting that parents overwhelmingly believe children are on track when “that’s not actually true.” She argued that objective test data provide an academic equivalent of a doctor’s checkup, allowing problems to be identified before they become crises.
From this perspective, the anti-testing movement did not liberate education. It removed one of the only reliable warning systems parents had.
Lowering the Bar Instead of Raising Performance
If grade inflation were the only problem, parents might still have standardized tests as an independent measure. But even those measures are increasingly being softened.
Federal law requires states to administer annual standardized tests in reading and math for grades three through eight. Yet multiple states have recently lowered what counts as “proficient,” creating the appearance of academic gains without actual improvement in learning.
Wisconsin offers one of the clearest examples.
After redesigning its assessment system, English proficiency in Wisconsin reportedly rose to 48 percent from 39 percent. But this did not reflect a dramatic educational breakthrough. Instead, the state lowered proficiency standards and recalibrated performance labels. One district official described comparing old and new results as “not exactly apples to oranges, but it’s like apples to apple juice.”
Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alaska, and New York have also revised scoring systems or lowered cut scores. In Oklahoma, changes produced stunning apparent gains. Third grade proficiency jumped from 29 percent to 51 percent in a single year, a leap experts described as largely artificial.
Harvard researcher Tom Kane warned that lowering standards after pandemic learning losses risks misleading parents further. “Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are lagging behind,” he said. “Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”
The Cost of Looking Away
Parents cannot advocate for problems they do not know exist.
Arne Duncan warned that families are often not using tutoring or intervention programs precisely because they do not realize their children are struggling. If a child comes home with good grades and reassuring messages from school, why would parents seek extra help? Why would they believe intervention is needed?
This may be the greatest tragedy of all. An education system designed to reassure parents rather than inform them risks producing graduates who are far less prepared than their transcripts suggest.
The uncomfortable truth is that parents deserve honesty. Students deserve honesty. Schools should not fear objective measurement, and education systems should not redefine success downward to make performance look better on paper.
Testing is not perfect. No honest observer claims it is. But when the alternative is inflated grades, softened standards, and widespread confusion about whether children are actually learning, abandoning accountability begins to look less like compassion and more like surrender.
