The Growth vs. Proficiency Debate

A recent analysis of millions of student test scores has declared that Washington, D.C., is “leading the nation.” Using a methodology that allows comparisons between scores from different state tests, a prestigious team of researchers ranked the nation’s capital first in both reading and math—that is, in terms of “growth,” which reflects improvement over time.

But if you go by test-score “proficiency,” or absolute numbers of students meeting a specific benchmark, D.C. doesn’t look so hot. A report by the D.C. Policy Center found that in 2025, only 26 percent of students scored proficient in math and only 38 percent in reading. No more than 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors met the bar for being “college or career ready” as measured by the SAT.

There’s a longstanding debate about which measure to look to when evaluating progress: growth or proficiency. Steven Wilson, a former charter school leader, opts for proficiency. He recently told The 74’s Jill Barshay that any jurisdiction where most students aren’t “functioning at grade level,” as in D.C., is “nothing to applaud.”

D.C. officials acknowledge there’s more to be done, but basically—pointing to growth—they’re trying for a standing ovation. “We are recognized as the fastest-improving urban school system in the country,” crowed Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn in the wake of the national report, called the Education Scorecard.1

One argument against relying on proficiency is that it rewards schools serving a more affluent demographic. It can look like the credit belongs to the school or the system, when in fact students are just coming in with more knowledge and skills than their lower-income peers, enabling them to score higher on tests. Meanwhile, a school across town serving a lower-income population might actually be doing a better job of raising scores, but because its students started out so far behind, it still gets characterized as low-performing.

Those who focus on growth also worry that relying on proficiency is just too much of a downer. Tom Kane, one of the authors of the Education Scorecard, told Barshay that his research team “chose growth in order to ‘combat’ what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.”

It’s also true, however, that a focus on growth can obscure continuing inequities—or even unfairly reward systems that simply increase their share of affluent students. I live in D.C., and I’ve been hearing officials here describe it as “the fastest-improving urban school system in the country” for at least ten years. And it’s true that scores for almost all student subgroups have gone up by a few percentage points. But if you look closely, it becomes clear that the “improvement” hasn’t narrowed the huge gaps between them.

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According to the D.C. Policy Center, the reading proficiency rate for white students—who, in D.C., are overwhelmingly affluent—is currently 58 percentage points higher than the rate for Black students and 61 points higher than the rate for the economically disadvantaged. Ten years ago, scores for white students were 56 points higher than those for either of the other categories. The rising tide may have lifted all boats, but it hasn’t brought them any closer. In fact, they’re slightly wider apart.

Many of D.C.’s public school students come from low-income families, so it can be easy to assume that overall achievement figures reflect their experience.2 For example, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, argues that you have to put the D.C. statistics on college-and-career-readiness in context. The fact that only 16 percent of high school students meet that bar doesn’t look so bad, he says, when you consider that “just 14 percent of students from the poorest quartile of the American population graduate from college.” Students from low-income families start school far behind, he points out, and “excellent schools can’t make up all of the difference.”

But Petrilli’s argument assumes that all of those college-and-career-ready D.C. students come from low-income families. In fact, they don’t. In 2025, only 4 percent of economically disadvantaged D.C. students met the college-and-career bar, while 70 percent of white students did. Surely an excellent school system should be able to do better than that.

As the college-and-career-ready breakdown suggests, much of the “growth” in D.C. is attributable to the fact that the public school system, which used to be unbelievably dysfunctional, has figured out how to do things like heat school buildings, deliver textbooks to classrooms when needed, and ensure that teachers get their paychecks. That means that affluent parents are now more willing to entrust their children to the system—and those children are likely to do well on standardized tests, pretty much no matter what their schools do.

In addition, there are now a number of charter schools in D.C. that attract parents who previously would have sprung for private school tuition or moved to the suburbs.3 Charter school students, like those in traditional public schools, take D.C.’s state tests. Overall, the share of white students in the city’s public schools has grown from 4.5 percent in 2000 to about 14 percent today.

Education has certainly improved somewhat for kids from lower-income families, especially at high-performing charter schools serving that demographic. But the real question isn’t whether elementary and middle school test scores for those kids have gone up, which is what the Education Scorecard measures. It’s whether the academic achievement of high school graduates has improved—and that 4 percent college-and-career-readiness figure is revealing.4

It’s not that I take pleasure in being negative. Growth is something to celebrate. But too much focus on growth can lead to a sense of complacency and prevent policymakers from recognizing fundamental problems. They might believe that what they’re doing is working just fine and that to make more progress, they just need to do more of it.

I’m not familiar enough with D.C. schools to say definitively what the fundamental problems here are, but I suspect that a big one—at least as regards the traditional D.C. public school sector, which educates a little over half of public school students—is an inadequate curriculum, especially at the elementary level. If you don’t start building kids’ academic knowledge early, the gaps between high- and low-performing students increase every year and become almost impossible to narrow.

A little over a decade ago, DCPS officials decided to adopt a “knowledge-building” elementary literacy curriculum. At the time, I was told, there wasn’t one that was commercially available, so they recruited DCPS teachers to create a homegrown one, working over the summers.

Maybe that was an understandable choice at the time, but homegrown curricula are rarely effective. Creating a curriculum is a complex task, and most teachers have no training in how to write one.

I was given glimpses of the DCPS literacy curriculum about 10 years ago. While it certainly wasn’t the worst curriculum I’d seen, I was not impressed, and sources tell me it hasn’t gotten much better. Meanwhile, there are now a number of well-constructed, readily available knowledge-building curricula that DCPS could adopt. For some reason, though, officials have stuck with their homegrown one, and all but a handful of elementary schools are using it.5

I’m not saying a true knowledge-building curriculum is a silver bullet. It’s certainly possible to implement any curriculum in a way that doesn’t work. So you need good training and professional development for teachers, grounded in the specifics of the curriculum. But if you don’t have a content-rich curriculum, improving education outcomes for children from historically disadvantaged groups is going to be far more difficult.

One problem that has affected thousands of districts across the country—and would probably affect DCPS too, if it wanted to adopt a published curriculum—is that it has become increasingly difficult to identify an effective curriculum. That’s largely because the most influential evaluator of curricula, EdReports, has given out some misleading ratings in recent years.

EdReports recently acquired a new leader, which might signal positive change. But that new leader is none other than the top DCPS education official, Dr. Lewis D. Ferebee. Predictably, in announcing his appointment, EdReports described him as the leader of “the fastest-improving urban school system in the country.”

In the same press release, Ferebee said that he has “followed and used EdReports’ reviews for years as a district leader.” But during his seven-year tenure as DCPS chancellor, he didn’t adopt an elementary literacy curriculum that had been reviewed by EdReports. And as far as I know, the home-grown DCPS curriculum he retained has never been reviewed by EdReports or any other independent entity. Maybe Ferebee will do a better job of distinguishing between effective and ineffective literacy curricula than his predecessor, but I haven’t seen anything to inspire optimism.

A focus on growth over proficiency may have helped Ferebee get his new job, but it’s not an accurate formula for evaluating success. Nor is proficiency alone. Nor, frankly, is any measure premised on standardized reading comprehension scores. They’re extremely blunt instruments for measuring progress, and they have a history of distorting curriculum and instruction in ways that hold kids back. If I ruled the world, I would get rid of them.

But given that I don’t rule the world, I’d say the best approach is to take into account both growth and proficiency and understand what each of them represents. And researcher Tom Kane has said that the next iteration of the Education Scorecard will also include the proportion of students who are proficient in a district and compare that data point to other districts with similar demographics.

That sounds like progress. But I hope the report will also break down proficiency rates for student subgroups, including those who are economically disadvantaged, and compare those. Those figures could be depressing, but they might also point up districts that aren’t just raising average test scores but also significantly improving the performance of their most vulnerable students.