In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate study. report of the DC Policy Center, a local independent think tank. Only 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered college or career ready.
A school system can improve quickly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient or by how many students improve each year?
Critics of public schools complain about low achievement rates.
“Progress of any magnitude is a good thing, but when the majority of students (about two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C.) are not performing at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former Massachusetts education policymaker and charter school leader. “The system continues to fail the majority of students.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes six recent school reform efforts.)
Even before last week’s release of national data, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor of education, touted the strength of schools after 2025 annual testing revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the per-grade gains the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievements are second to none in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 report. blog post.
Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-standing debate in the field of education about whether to focus on competition or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth to “combat” what they consider an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.
“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”
In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also published a list of 108 “rising districts“: School districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have a large proportion of students below grade level.
In theory, if a district’s scores continue to increase by enormous amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves a percentage point or two a year, it could take decades for most students to receive a decent education. Meanwhile, students currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most children are far behind grade level could mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.
“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to school systems that educate almost all of their students, instead of a third of them,” Wilson said.
Wilson points to individual schools or networks of charter schools, where very High percentages or low income. students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across a large school district.
Income is an important factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on competition, wealthy suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families start much later.
That concern has led researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past two decades. A widely cited example came from the research of Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was dominating the more effective schools in the country based on student growth, although many students were behind in their grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis due to changes in its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands at the moment.)
Still, many parents would probably prefer to enroll their children in a school system where most students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small proportion of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.
Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students above the proficiency line is also important. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers plan to add a new data point showing the proportion of children who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.
The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Competency captures whether they have learned enough.
That’s what makes Washington such a telling case. It shows how a school system can record some of the country’s greatest gains and still fall short on the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.
