In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students meet grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent are proficient in reading, according to a separate report by the DC Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Only 16 percent of high school students are considered college or career ready.
A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The controversy fuels an important political 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 seize on low proficiency rates.
“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in D.C.’s case — are not functioning at grade level, that’s not something to applaud,” said Stephen Wilson, a former Massachusetts education policymaker and charter school leader. “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book The Lost Decade criticizes recent school reform efforts.)
Even before the national data was released last week, school leaders in Washington were celebrating the gains. Paul Keane, deputy mayor for education, highlighted the power of schools after annual tests in 2025 revealed a huge 3.6 percent improvement in reading and maths, similar to the grade gains calculated by the Education Scorecard team. “Our academic performance is second to none in the country in terms of growth,” Keane said in March 2026. blog post.
Tom Cain, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-standing debate in education about whether to focus on skills or growth. In that report, he said, the research team chose growth to “combat” what they see as 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, restore a public sense of action regarding public education.”
In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also published a list of 108 “areas on the rise“: school districts where math and reading gains exceed 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 these districts still have a large share of students below grade level.
In theory, if a district’s scores continue to rise 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 by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades before most students get a decent education. Meanwhile, students currently in the system are losing. They can’t wait for this progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are falling behind the grade could mislead the public and potentially lead school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.
“Let’s take klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating almost all of their students, not a third of their students,” Wilson said.
Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks where many high rate of low income students are at or above grade. It is much more difficult to replicate this success with low-income students in an entire large school district.
Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and politicians focus only on skills, wealthy suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more efficient, but because students from wealthier families start far ahead.
This concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past few decades. A widely cited example comes from research by Shawn Riordan, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago the most effective 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 due to changes in the state’s assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago ranks right now.)
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 attracting more students across the skill line is also important. For the Education Evaluation Team’s next report, the researchers plan to add a new data point showing the share of children who are proficient compared to other areas with similar demographics.
Disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth shows whether students are learning more than they were learning before. The skill shows whether they have learned enough.
This is what makes Washington such a telling case. It shows how a school system can achieve some of the highest achievement in the country and still fall short on the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math on grade level.
