America’s Fastest-Evolving School System Still Doesn’t Come Short

By 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students will meet grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent will be able to read, according to a separate report by the DC Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Only 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered college or career ready.

The school system can develop quickly and leave many children behind. The controversy fuels an important political and emotional debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?

Critics of public schools take issue with low learning rates.

“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when so many students — about two-thirds to three in the DC area — are not performing at grade level, this is not something to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former Massachusetts education policy maker and charter school leader. “Most of the students are still failed by the program.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)

Even before last week’s national data was released, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, applauded the schools’ strength after the 2025 annual tests revealed a positive 3.6 percent improvement in reading and maths, matching the grade level increase calculated by the Education Scorecard team. “Our academic success is unmatched in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 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 education sector about focusing on skills or growth. In the report, he said, the research team chose growth to “combat” what it sees as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.

“We are trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these areas,” said Kane. “And I hope that, if we can, we will rebuild the public mind in relation to public education.”

In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “growth districts”: school districts where math and reading gains exceed those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no similar districts within the city. But its benefits are comparable to many of the states listed. And, like Washington, many of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.

In theory, if the district’s scores continue to increase by large amounts each year, students should reach higher levels and eventually reach the standard. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if the school system improves by one or two percent a year, it could take decades for most students to get a decent education. Meanwhile, students currently in the program have lost out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where many children are far behind on grade level could mislead the public and cause school leaders to implement the wrong policies.

“Let’s take the Klieg torch and take it to school programs that teach almost all of their students, rather than taking a third of their students,” said Wilson.

Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where the highest percentage of low-income students are at or above the standard. It is very difficult to replicate that success with low-income students across a large school district.

Income is a big factor in this debate. When the public and policy makers focus only on knowledge, the elites tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be more successful, not because their schools are performing well, but because students from wealthier families start farther away.

That concern has led researchers to focus on growth-based approaches to school performance over the past few decades. The most-cited example came from a study by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, which found a decade ago that Chicago was running the most successful schools in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes in its state assessment, so it’s unclear where Chicago currently stands.)

However, many parents would rather enroll their children in a school system where the majority of students are on grade level, even if there is little or no annual progress, than a school where only a small percentage of students are on grade level but the school is changing and improving.

Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students above the faculty line is important as well. In the next report of the Education Scoreboard group, the researchers plan to add a new data point that shows the share of gifted children compared to other districts with similar demographics.

Disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures that students are learning more than before. Technology controls whether they have learned enough.

That’s what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fail on a basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.