Schools are failing at telling parents the truth about student achievement

Only 30% of teachers rate report cards as one of the important ways to gauge student achievement, indicating that most of the teachers giving those A’s and B’s have a fuller picture, writes Arne Duncan, former U.S. secretary of education and Bibb Hubbard, the founder and president of Learning Heroes (stock.adobe.com)

“Education runs on lies.” These are harsh words coming from a former U.S. education secretary in a 2018 book about public schooling in America. 

But they’re especially true today as the country reflects on the past 40 years of education reform sparked by the seminal report, A Nation at Risk. School systems are coping with unprecedented drops in student achievement since the pandemic, which made pre-existing achievement gaps even more apparent.