Will DOGE cancel NAEP?

Probably not, But that's not stopping Trump/Musk cultists from dreaming up why that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.

It is widely believed by both the left and right that the social sciences completely uphold leftist ideology. The left believes that this shows the social sciences are True and the right believes that this shows the social sciences are Fake.

A small number of observers, however, point out that the best research in the human sciences seldom vindicates wokeness. Not too many people pay attention to what we notice, but the ones who do tend to be the ones you ought to most want to influence.

I recently posted on some things we can learn from the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.

The New York Times news section insinuates that the Trump Administration will cancel the NAEP exams and American participation in the international PISA, both regular generators of SteveSailer.Net content.

Are Schools Succeeding? Trump Education Department Cuts Could Make It Hard to Know.

At least 800 education department research employees and outside partners have lost jobs. The cuts will decimate research and data collection.

By Dana Goldstein and Sarah Mervosh

Published March 12, 2025

Deep cuts to staff and funding in the Department of Education will deal a major blow to the public’s understanding of how American students are performing and what schools can do to improve.

On Tuesday evening, at least 100 federal workers who focus on education research, student testing and basic data collection were laid off from the Department of Education, part of a bloodletting of 1,300 staffers.

The Carter Administration’s creation of the Department of Education was one of the last spasms of the LBJ/Nixon Great Society, taking Education out of the colossal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Hence, Republicans have been demanding it abolition ever since, although abolition would mostly involve transferring most of its functions to other departments. It’s a pretty ho-hum dispute.

Outside of government, at least 700 people in the field of social science research were laid off or furloughed over the past week, largely as a result of federal cuts to education research.

The layoffs came just weeks after the latest federal test scores showed American children’s reading and math skills at record lows. Trump administration officials have pointed to those low scores as evidence that the Department of Education had failed and needed to be cut.

But now the extent of those cuts raises questions about how the federal test itself will continue.

Other basic information about schools, along with research about what works to improve them, seems most likely to be degraded or to disappear entirely. Many of those who were laid off worked on projects evaluating math and reading instruction, disability supports and other subjects critical to student learning. …

The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, had already seen budget and contract cuts that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Last night, the vast majority of its staff was laid off, according to three former employees and an email sent to I.E.S. staff that was reviewed by The New York Times.

That included widespread layoffs to the team that administers several important tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, which measures how competitive U.S. students are globally, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered a gold standard in the industry and is the only national test that compares student performance across all 50 states.

Education researchers and even those involved with overseeing NAEP were scrambling to understand what the cuts would mean for the test, which is mandated by Congress and overseen by a separate, independent board.

Federal employees who lost their jobs helped administer the test and were “essential” to ensuring it was accurate, said Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard who previously sat on the board that oversees the exam.

“If Congress and the department don’t act quickly to bolster national assessment expertise, who could trust that this once ‘gold standard’ test is still fair and comparable?” he said.

The national test was thought to be a priority for the Trump administration, even as it was possible it could be moved to a different department. Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government, had suggested moving the division that oversees NAEP to the Census Bureau. …

But I can’t find much evidence that the Trump Administration is seriously thinking about canceling the NAEP, so this sounds like a scare story in the NYT. For instance, Trump officials have repeatedly cited the declining scores in 2022-24 as evidence that Democrats Are Bad. The odds are pretty good that they might rebound in 2026, giving Trump another talking point.

So far, the only Trump cutback to the NAEP has been to cancel one variant of the 12th grade test, a minor test which has been routinely canceled in the past (this particular test hasn’t been administered since 2012 — 12th grade tests aren’t given as often as the 4th and 8th grade tests; the whole ensemble seems beset by Senior Slumpitis).

The NAEP costs somewhere between $150 to $192 million per year, which is not cheap, and perhaps could be done more efficiently. On the other hand, during an era of smartphones and AI, tests need to pay for a lot of proctoring.

On the gripping hand, so what? It’s extremely useful to have a national school achievement test to keep state tests from getting rigged too hard.

Some of the research cuts immediately affect students and teachers who had been participating in the educational equivalents of medical drug trials.

It would seem like there are two types of of federally subsidized studies: basic data collection like the NAEP, the CDC mortality data I often reference, and so forth, which are hugely useful to both academic and independent researchers vs. boutique studies.

The odds seem to be that the Trump Administration isn’t thinking too hard about cancelling NAEP. Boutique studies, however …

One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy.

Oregon has the worst NAEP scores, adjusted for demographics, of any of the 50 states.

The findings from the study were supposed to guide school spending decisions in the future.

Fire Oregon administrators who brought about this trend in Oregon’s 8th grade Math scores?

It would be reassuring if the Times were to cite examples of these kind of boutique studies demonstrating what’s obvious from the macro research like the NAEP: woke Oregon’s educators are massively screwing up what ought to be pretty easy: the education of its heavily white population. But boutique studies tend to be oblivious to the obvious.

What have boutique studies of education determined?

The big finding has been that phonics is better than whole language instruction for teaching all but the brightest kids to read. My commenter Last Real Calvinist notes:

… once you're a fluent reader, there really are only 'word' readers. Phonics is critical in the initial stages of learning to read, but then it becomes less important as vocabulary and word recognition rapidly increase. It's a bit like training wheels.

The problem with teaching kids to recognize words is in how this has been carried out in schools. In short, many children in English speaking countries have been the victims of gross educational malpractice packaged as 'reading recovery', 'whole language', 'balanced literacy', and other programs premised on the assumption that learning to read should be 'natural', and that if kids are just exposed to lots of reading out loud, and then are given stories they like, their reading ability will blossom and grow like a beautiful wildflower, without them having to be subjected to nasty repetitive rules-based algorithms such as phonics. They're explicitly taught to guess what words are based on photos, or by just blurting out whatever they think might make sense coming next. They're *discouraged* from taking advantage of one of humanity's greatest inventions, i.e. alphabetic written characters, so that their teachers can cop good feelz because they're not 'drilling and killing'.

This has been going on for the better part of a century, although it really got bad in the early 2000s. I strongly recommend a recent podcast series called 'Sold a Story', in which a journalist (give her a chance; she's remarkably even-handed) named Emily Hanford traces out this sad tale in vivid detail. This podcast has been extremely influential, and has essentially turned the field of literacy teaching upside down in the USA, to the point that many states have based their schools' approach to reading based on its findings.

There's a good summary of the podcast and its effects from Forbes here:

Info on the podcast itself is here:

It's a well-produced and extremely listenable story.

But teachers don’t like teaching phonics, it’s boring, so decades of boutique research has had limited effect.

It would be great if DOGE could distinguish who is doing useful boutique research on education and who is wasting taxpayer money. But it appears that DOGE doesn’t have time for that, much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis.

On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.