On Tuesday, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported its new results for how 15-year-olds are faring across about 80 nations. In what’s become a familiar theme, US math and reading scores were flat since the last test in 2015, with the US ranking 30th in the world in math and 8th in reading. As a New York Times headline stated, “‘It Just Isn’t Working’: PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts.” Indeed, the results showed that about one-fifth of American 15-year-olds haven’t yet mastered the reading skills expected of a 10-year-old.

These results are disappointing, but not surprising. As we noted last spring, US student performance on PISA has been stagnant — for two decades, since 2000. While scholars have raised legitimate questions about how much faith we should put in PISA, the results mirror what we see on the gold standard domestic assessment, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Indeed, the new NAEP results, released just last month, reported a continued, decade-long stagnation in US student achievement.

The remarkable thing, as we observed in the spring, is that these grim results have been accompanied by close to twenty years of impressive gains on annual state tests — the kinds of outcomes eagerly touted by state leaders, and required first by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and now by its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act. The ongoing disparity between measures such as PISA and NAEP, on one hand, and state tests, on the other, should leave us leery when it comes to these ubiquitous assessments, which get used for everything from accountability systems to school improvement plans to research into which reforms “work.”

As we wrote last spring, “The politicos and state education officials claiming credit for these [state test] gains are the same ones who choose state tests, define what qualifies as ‘proficient,’ and monitor graduation rates to guard against funny business. The results are tied into state accountability systems, where lousy results can produce practical and political headaches. Thus, policymakers have both the means and the incentive to inflate the numbers any way they can.” And there’s good cause to believe that such shenanigans are all too common: Researchers have reported that gains on state assessments tend to outpace gains on the far more reliable NAEP by an astounding 50 to 100 percent.

The PISA and NAEP results are disconcerting. They should prompt plenty of hard questions, including about how much faith we should have in state tests which too often provide a fundamentally misleading picture of how American students are faring.

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