Every two years, the “Nation’s Report Card” reports on how well students are performing in reading and math.
The last few years, the results have not been good. But, critically, those results have looked only at students in public schools.
Meanwhile, there’s been an explosion in the number of students who are using public dollars to attend private schools. The graph below from the EdChoice ABCs of School Choice report shows the growth in the number of students participating in Education Savings Account, voucher, and tax-credit savings programs. As you can see from their chart, these programs served 1.2 million students in 2024-25.
Source: The ABCs of School Choice, EdChoice.org.
That’s still not very large in comparison to the number of students enrolled in public schools, which is closer to 49.5 million nationwide, but it’s growing rapidly. And the number of students in publicly-funded private schools is growing particularly fast in certain states. Florida leads the country with 13% of its students enrolled in private school choice programs, followed by Arizona at 10%.
Former Florida Commissioner Manny Diaz noted these problems in the wake of the most recent NAEP results. In an op-ed for The Daily Signal, he wrote:
Florida has more than 1.4 million students utilizing a school choice option, including more than 524,000 students receiving Family Empowerment Scholarships for private schooling and homeschooling. I am proud of this exponential growth, as compared to 2022 when only 165,000 students were utilizing Family Empowerment Scholarships, as we have given families a real choice in their education and real control over their future. In fact, historically these scholarship-recipient students have outperformed their public-school peers as tracked by studies required by state law.
Unfortunately, when this sizeable portion of our students are outside the strictly public-school sample of National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test must expand its sample to include these high-performing students.
Diaz is right. The times are changing, and NAEP must change with it.
Right now, we have no good way to know how students in private schools are doing. The law authorizing NAEP says that it shall, “conduct a national assessment… in a valid and reliable manner on student academic achievement in public and private elementary schools and secondary schools at least once every 2 years, in grades 4 and 8 in reading and mathematics (emphasis added).” In other words, Congress wanted to know how students in private schools were doing, at least on a national basis.
And yet, NAEP has been regularly unable to deliver even that national estimate. Due to sampling issues it says, “Sample size was insufficient to permit a reliable estimate for other [non-Catholic] private schools in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2024.” As achievement scores have been plummeting in the public sector, it would be helpful to understand how those trends compare to students in private schools.
Currently, the federal law doesn’t require NAEP to look at private schools within states, but perhaps it should given the changing policy environment. The state-level results for places like Florida and Arizona will become increasingly narrow if more and more students opt out of traditional public schools.
The current NAEP law also includes a specific prohibition against sampling students who are homeschooled. This is a delicate topic, and the homeschool exemption may have made sense at one time when those students represented a tiny fraction of students. But does a blanket prohibition still make sense, as more students attend microschools or pursue other non-traditional schooling options?
Given the changing policy environment, Congress will need to grapple with what it wants to learn from the Nation’s Report Card. As the authorizing legislation states, the purpose of NAEP is to, “provide, in a timely manner, a fair and accurate measurement of student academic achievement and reporting of trends in such achievement in reading, mathematics, and other subject matter…” Without further action, NAEP will become less and less representative of students across the country.