NAEP, often called the Nation’s Report Card, is the largest ongoing assessment of student achievement in the U.S., intended to reflect what students know in core academic content areas like math and history. Despite the U.S. Department of Education operating with significantly fewer personnel, the effort signals a desire by federal officials to shorten NAEP’s reporting timelines, introduce adaptive digital assessments, modernize aging technology infrastructure and expand the types of student performance data available to states and policymakers.
Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), an independent, nonpartisan panel that creates NAEP policies, explained why NAEP is hard to change in a January open letter published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank.
“For example, the updated math and reading tests that today’s fourth and eighth graders are now taking are based on new frameworks that we started developing in 2018, before those fourth graders entered preschool,” she wrote.
Run by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education, NAEP has measured academic performance nationally since 1969. Rather than testing every student, NAEP assesses representative samples across states and districts. The NAGB sets policy for the assessment and determines testing frameworks.
The assessment is widely used by governors, policymakers, researchers and advocacy groups as a national benchmark, because states use different academic standards and testing systems. However, NAEP became especially prominent following the COVID-19 pandemic, when steep declines in math and reading scores fueled national debates over learning loss, school recovery strategies and academic interventions.
In 2025, the Trump administration and DOGE-led restructuring dramatically reduced staffing at the Department of Education and especially IES.
HOW IS NAEP BEING MODERNIZED?
In her letter, Muldoon said that although the program’s reputable systems helped establish decades of reliable national trend data, those same structures can slow efforts to adapt the assessment to new technologies and policy demands.
The Next Gen NAEP initiative, which aims to transform both how assessments are administered and how achievement data is reported, builds on NAEP’s transition from paper-based testing to digitally administered assessments beginning in the mid-2010s, which enabled faster reporting timelines, interactive tests and expanded contextual data collection.
Muldoon specifically noted that NAEP’s technology infrastructure was designed more than a decade ago, before generative AI and more sophisticated large-scale assessment platforms became widespread. She also said NAEP has not fully incorporated modern data science, analytics and visualization tools that could make results easier for educators and policymakers to use.
The lengthy timeline for developing and releasing NAEP results has become another central concern for federal officials. Historically, NAEP results took months to be released after testing concluded, often rendering the data outdated by the time it reached the public. Muldoon noted that assessments administered in 2026 and publicly released in early 2027 are still based on testing frameworks first developed in 2018 and 2019, underscoring how slowly the system adapts to changes in education policy, technology and classroom instruction.
Thus, one of the initiative’s primary goals, Muldoon wrote, is to shorten those development and reporting cycles so assessment data can reach educators and policymakers more quickly.
NAEP is now exploring adaptive, multistage testing models that adjust question difficulty based on a student’s real-time performance. According to officials, these adaptive approaches offer advantages: They can shorten testing sessions, improve overall score precision and reduce student fatigue while providing a much more accurate measurement across diverse student achievement levels.
According to Muldoon, the initiative is structured around five central questions:
- How technology and AI can expedite test development and reporting
- How NAEP’s technology infrastructure can be modernized
- How NAEP data can be easier to access and use
- What cost savings could support additional state-level reporting beyond math and reading
- How to expand data reporting capabilities while minimizing the burden on students, schools and districts
Muldoon said policymakers increasingly want state-level data in subjects like civics, history and science, but NAEP currently reports many of those results only nationally. She also noted that generating state-level results would traditionally require much larger student samples, creating additional testing burdens.
“The project will culminate with an actionable roadmap the Governing Board and NCES will use to guide policymaking and implementation for the NAEP program. The initiative will generate a series of publicly available reports for the field,” the initiative’s website says.
Representatives from NAGB, NCES and IES declined or did not respond to requests for interviews for this story.
