Nine in 10 American parents think their kid is performing at or above grade level. On NAEP, 30 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading and 28 percent in math. Ariel Kalil and Derek Rury unpack that gap in The New York Times today, and the experiment they ran is what stuck with me. They presented 2,000 parents with scenarios in which a child's grade and test score pointed in different directions, then asked how much time and money they'd invest in academic support. When grades were high and test scores low, many parents saw no reason to act. When grades were low and test scores high, they responded. On average, parents were willing to pay 14 percent more to fix a drop in grades than a comparable drop in test scores. Grades arrive often, in plain language. Test scores arrive once a year, in formats even well-educated parents find confusing. Guess which one wins.

The independent check on grades—standardized testing—is getting weaker, not stronger. In more than half of states, proficiency rates on state tests now exceed NAEP by 15 points or more. And as Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger and Sara Schapiro argue in Education Week, the federal infrastructure that produces the cleaner signal is facing real pressure—the President's budget proposes a 67 percent cut to IES, the agency behind NAEP and the State Longitudinal Data System grants that fund cradle-to-career data systems across the country. Congress rejected the same cuts last year, but the question keeps coming back. IES is also a primary source of the rigorous evidence leaders rely on to make consequential calls, and those calls don't wait for the evidence to catch up.

Take the techlash. The genre is now well-established: another week, another story about parents and teachers turning on classroom screens. The latest comes from AP's Jocelyn Gecker, who reports today on parents in Arlington and an LA teacher tired of competing with Minecraft. The reporting is real. But the evidence base is still genuinely mixed, and the narrative has been outrunning the research for a while now.

-Thomas

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