Senators examining students progress measurement
What do these US legislators want to know?
Legislators in the US Senate issued a request for comments about measuring student success. In “HELP Chair Requests Stakeholder Feedback on Improving Academic Growth,” Kuna Tavlin of the Council for Exceptional Children reported that Senator Bill Cassidy, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions requested input from the public. Here is her lede:
U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is seeking input from parents and other stakeholders on how to measure student success. Specifically, the Committee is soliciting input on three focus areas: developing fair and high-quality measures of student growth; empowering families through clearer communication of school performance, including growth data; and strengthening the use of growth data to inform policymaking.
The HELP committee released a document detailing the request. It is a multi-page PDF; this is the top of it and it’s linked to the full document.
The committee uses NAEP data to argue that students are not doing well, and argument most of us will have heard and seen multiple times in the past few decades, but they also promote the idea that educators, parents, and policy makers need measures that reflect growth.
We in special education know a bit about monitoring progress. However, reading the document, it appears pretty clear that these folks are pretty wedded to norm-referenced, psychometric measurement, not the more granular, behavioral measures we are accustomed to using. Maybe if would help if they knew a thing or two about, say, “Individual Growth and Development Indicator (IGDI) Comprehensive Assessment Project,” curriculum-based measurement (e.g., National Center on Student Progress Monitoring), and such.
Of course, this committee is not likely to be interested in the sorts of measures we often use to measure progress in special education. Big, grand, scores that estimate the competence of very large groups and permit policy makers to characterize entire school buildings, local education agencies, and geopolitical groups are more the appropriate style, right? So, my suggestions would probably not go very far, even if I could explain how one could roll-up the scores of individual students, aggregating them in to summary “scores” and creating readily understandable metrics (e.g., percentage of students meeting ORF benchmarks).
Anyway, as you can read in the document, HELP invited help (teehee) from parents, practitioners, and others interested in education. Mayhaps some Dear Readers would like to provide guidance to the committee. The committee asked that interested parties submit feedback and comments to K12Growth@help.senate.gov by 13 February 2026.1
Footnote
For those with superstitious leanings: You might want to submit your suggestions at least a day earlier, as 13 February is a Friday.