The nation’s report card has a hard time grading private schools

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The nation’s report card has a hard time grading private schools

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is known as the nation’s report card. But as more students leave public schools, the test risks becoming less representative of the nation’s students.

Unlike public schools, private schools aren’t required to participate in the test, which is administered every two years to a representative sample of roughly half a million American students. Not enough private school students take the test to report distinct results for that group, even at the national level. Home-schooled students aren’t included at all.

This isn’t a new problem — the last time NAEP reported separate private school results was 2013. But as more students attend private school or homeschool with public money, the significance of the information gap will only grow, NAEP governing board members and independent researchers told .

“I see it as the most significant challenge facing the NAEP program in the medium term,” said Martin West, a Harvard University education professor and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, “because it threatens our ability to speak with confidence about states’ success in supporting student learning.”

A dispute in Florida over the state’s 2024 NAEP results hints at a future where more states question the validity of their scores and where comparisons among states are trickier. When results were released in early 2025, . Then-Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education that blamed the decline, in part, on excluding private school students.

“This issue only stands to grow, as Florida has chosen a path that puts students and families before teachers unions and provides universal school choice,” Diaz wrote, before concluding with a call to “make NAEP great once again.”

Observers said the increase in Florida’s private school enrollment between 2022 and 2024 simply wasn’t large enough to account for the decline, but state education officials remain concerned.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist who frequently works with NAEP data, said “What happened in Florida in 2024 is a harbinger of the future as private school enrollment grows. It will become increasingly plausible for states to say that our public school results aren’t representative of our achievement.”

“If NAEP is the nation’s report card, then questions about private school achievement will become the dog that ate the homework,” added Kane, who is not involved in administering the test. “It will be a source of evasions and spin.”

Low private school NAEP participation leaves an information void

NAEP is considered , a no-stakes test that allows reliable comparisons over time and between states.

The put the test in the public spotlight in a new way, fueling competing calls for greater investment in public schools — or more pathways out of them.

Congress intended for public and private school students to take the test, but federal law only requires public schools to participate in the main NAEP reading and math tests administered to fourth and eighth-grade students.

Private schools make up about a quarter of American schools and educate about 9% of K-12 students, according to recent federal data. But a much smaller share of private school students take NAEP. In 2024, they accounted for about 1.3% of students who took the main tests.

Low participation means NAEP doesn’t have enough data from private school students to report separately on their performance. State results only reflect public school students in those states.

That lack of information already complicates state-by-state comparisons. The shows private school students account for 15% of Wisconsin students and 13% of students in Florida, Louisiana, and New York, but just 2% of students in Utah and Wyoming.

Higher private school participation would allow their NAEP results to be reported separately at the national level and incorporated into state-level results. That could help answer questions about whether changes over time or differences between states are driven by the share of students in private school, West said.

It would take dramatically higher participation to report private school results separately at the state level. That’s not a high priority, West said, because NAEP data isn’t as useful for comparing the effectiveness of public and private schools.

Meanwhile, 1.2 million students participated in some sort of publicly funded school choice program in the 2024-25 school year, according to , an advocacy group.

That’s still less than 3% of K-12 public school enrollment, but the numbers have surged in the last few years and are expected to keep growing.

Private school leaders have mixed feelings about NAEP

Catholic schools participate at much higher rates than other private schools, and their NAEP results are reported separately. Catholic school students also showed some declines during the pandemic, but they have continued to post higher average scores than public school students.

“I’m not sure why people wouldn’t do it,” said Steven Cheeseman, president and CEO of the National Catholic Education Association. “The reality for us as Catholic schools is that we’ve always felt like it’s an important accountability measure.”

Michael Schuttloffel, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, said in an email that many private school leaders find the prospect of taking time out of the school day for a test that doesn’t directly benefit them “daunting.”

NAEP tries to by handling all the logistics. Officials hope a can find ways to reduce the testing burden further and make results more useful.

Some private schools also may have a “philosophical disposition against the idea of a standardized test — especially one administered by the federal government — being the principal measure of student learning or school success,” Schuttloffel wrote.

Schuttloffel said he shares that perspective, but added: “Nonetheless, knowing whether kids can read and do math is an important piece of the picture when we are trying to get our arms around what, and how well, our kids are learning.”

Ron Reynolds, who represents non-public schools on NAEP’s governing board, believes private schools are not only “shirking their responsibility” but also missing “a magnificent opportunity for private schools to tell their story writ large.”

The leaders of private school organizations are , Reynolds said, but “the challenge is delivering the message effectively to school site leadership and inducing buy-in at the site level.”

A new calls for Congress to charge NAEP’s governing board with increasing participation across all school types. Reynolds said he would support making participation a condition of receiving money from . While he would prefer not to see a mandate, public money brings with it certain responsibilities.

But parents likely would object strongly to mandates as federal meddling, Schuttloffel said.

Rob Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, has , but he sees less value in it for private schools. Parents and the public might learn more, he said, if those schools shared more data they already have.

If policymakers want more private school students to take NAEP, incentives such as automatic accreditation would be more appropriate than mandates, he said.

“Everyone says they want apples-to-apples comparisons, but we’ve had rotten apples for years and done nothing about it,” Enlow said.

Ultimately, the case for participating in NAEP is to contribute to reliable information and good policymaking, West said.

“It’s an appeal to the good of the nation or the quality of data we have for everyone,” he said.

The 2026 test administration is currently underway and expected to wrap up later this month. are expected in early 2027.

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