This month, we are featuring essays by Mark Schneider on how the Trump administration can modernize America’s standardized tests for students, Mark J. Warshawsky on the reasons for the declining birth rate in the United States, and Ryan Fedasiuk on questions that surround America’s rivalry with China. ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

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February 2026

Welcome to the February 2026 edition of The American Enterprise. This month, we are featuring essays by Mark Schneider ([link removed] ) on how the Trump administration can modernize America’s standardized tests, Mark J. Warshawsky ([link removed] ) on the reasons for the declining birth rate in the United States, and Ryan Fedasiuk ([link removed] ) on questions that surround America’s rivalry with China.

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The National Assessment of Educational Progress: “Gold Standard” or Lead Anchor? ([link removed] )

Schneider_02.2026 ([link removed] )

By Mark Schneider

American classrooms are constantly chasing the next education innovation, but left out of this process have been the tests we use to measure our students’ success. Every two years, the release of student achievement data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called ([link removed] ) the “gold standard” of educational testing, drives headlines on the state of American learning. Given the United States’ decentralized education system, NAEP’s biennial releases are the best-available national barometer of American education.

The assessment is considered so important that even officials in the Trump administration’s Education Department, who have been actively working to abolish their own department, have no plans to discontinue it.

Despite its critical role, NAEP is outdated, and its data are far too difficult to access and use. These two issues stem from the same cause: A handful of contractors—among them Pearson, Westat, and, most importantly, the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—have been steering NAEP for years. The power ([link removed] ) of this troika has stymied efforts to modernize NAEP in ways that would reduce costs and deliver more meaningful data to more stakeholders.

Ultimately, though, it’s not contractors but the federal government that is at fault. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) leads and manages NAEP contracts. It can and should require its vendors to modernize and become more useful to the American public. The Trump administration is uniquely positioned to do this.

To understand the options at the Trump administration’s disposal, we must first trace the history of how NAEP came to represent some of the worst of federal contracting.

What Is NAEP, and How Does It Work?

NAEP is overseen by two government entities. Its policies and testing schedule are overseen by the independent and nonpartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), a panel of 26 members appointed by the secretary of education. Members are chosen to represent a cross section of interests, including governors, testing experts, business representatives, teachers, and the public. The operational and technical aspects of NAEP fall under the purview of NCES, a federal statistical agency ([link removed] ) .

NAEP began testing students in 1969 to provide the nation a better picture of student ability. Since the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act ([link removed] ) , NAEP has tested fourth and eighth graders on reading and math every two years, tested 12th graders on reading and math every four years, and administered tests in a handful of other subjects (including science, civics, and US history) roughly every four years.

NAEP tests lots of students: In 2024, around 450,000 fourth and eighth graders took ([link removed] ) the reading and math tests. However, NAEP’s structure is different from that of better-known end-of-year state assessments. While a state tests all its students, NAEP selects a nationally representative sample of schools and tests a sample of students in those schools. Further, while state tests are geared to that state’s learning standards, NAEP, as a national assessment, must test across a much wider range of curricular topics.

Because it covers so much material, NAEP is too big for any single student to take in its entirety. Instead, each student answers only a subset of the test’s questions. NAEP then uses statistical tools to combine student performance into estimates at the national and state levels, broken down by subgroups such as race, sex, and income. These tools were pioneered by the late Robert Mislevy of ETS in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were considered cutting-edge. Forty years later, this cutting-edge design has become dull.

Members of the NAEP industrial complex often call ([link removed] ) it the gold standard because that moniker lends the test cachet as the nation’s premier assessment. Perhaps it was its self-regard as the gold standard that blinded them to NAEP’s flaws; perhaps it was bad leadership at NCES; perhaps it was bureaucratic inertia—in any case, the result is that NAEP lagged in making needed improvements and adopting modern testing technologies. Underneath all this, there was a growing risk aversion by contractors and NCES to change, turning NAEP’s gold standard sobriquet into a lead anchor.

This risk aversion was never more apparent than in the latest round of bidding for the government contracts to conduct NAEP. At that time, the independent scientific research institute RTI International led a consortium of high-quality companies that would have produced a better, cheaper NAEP. While the consortium scored high on technical merits, it lost the competition because a panel of government employees viewed the risks of changing the NAEP machine as too high.

Read the full essay here. >> ([link removed] )

KEEP READING

Warshawsky_02.2026 ([link removed] )

The Declining Birth Rate and Its Associations ([link removed] )

Mark J. Warshawsky

Fedasiuk_02.2026 ([link removed] )

In Search of a China Strategy ([link removed] )

Ryan Fedasiuk

Thanks for reading!

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