On August 21, 2025, two major developments shook the landscape of American education, exposing deep fissures in how the nation funds and measures its schools. In Washington, D.C., the federal government slashed the very staff and resources meant to keep the country’s education standards honest and fair. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, a judge declared the state’s school funding system unconstitutional, casting a harsh light on the persistent inequities in local taxation and educational opportunity. Both stories, unfolding thousands of miles apart, point to a single, urgent question: Who is truly responsible for ensuring every child in America receives a quality education?
For decades, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — better known as the Nation’s Report Card — has served as the country’s gold standard for measuring what students know in reading, math, and other core subjects. Administered nearly every year to more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8, and 12, NAEP’s results help policymakers, educators, and parents compare performance across states, districts, and demographic groups. According to APM Reports, the NAEP is one of the few federal education programs the Trump administration has publicly committed to preserving.
Yet, in early February 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk, descended on the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Their charge: root out “waste, fraud and abuse.” The results were dramatic. DOGE cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and eliminated more than 90% of the institute’s workforce. Among those let go were nearly all the psychometricians — the technical experts who ensure NAEP’s questions are fair, accurate, and up-to-date. By late August, only one such specialist remained at the National Center for Education Statistics.
“The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” Stanford professor Sean Reardon told APM Reports. Reardon relies on NAEP data to study achievement gaps between students from different income backgrounds. His concern is echoed by Mark Seidenberg, a renowned reading researcher, who warned, “These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are. A half-baked assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which is essentially another way of killing the assessment.”
Despite the turmoil, the Department of Education insists it is committed to maintaining NAEP’s “gold-standard status.” In an official statement, the department said, “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status.” The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy, has reassigned five staff members with technical expertise to help fill the gap. But some experts worry that’s not enough. Harvard’s Andrew Ho, a former board member, explained, “In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost.”
The immediate effects are already apparent. The Trump administration has delayed the release of 8th grade science, 12th grade math, and 12th grade reading results from the summer to September 2025. More concerning, the National Assessment Governing Board voted to eliminate more than a dozen scheduled tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The board also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029 — a move designed to avoid releasing results during a presidential election year.
These cutbacks come despite the fact that NAEP’s annual cost, about $190 million, is a tiny fraction of the Department of Education’s $195 billion 2025 budget. Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, told APM Reports, “You need a staff. The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”
Why does this matter so much? For one, NAEP acts as the “Rosetta stone” for comparing state test results, which vary widely in content and difficulty. Without a reliable national benchmark, it becomes nearly impossible to know how students in Minnesota stack up against those in Mississippi or Montana. Reardon’s Educational Opportunity Project, which combines NAEP data with state test scores, has been downloaded 50,000 times since 2016 and is used by everyone from the U.S. military to school superintendents. If NAEP’s quality slips, so too does the quality of information guiding decisions at every level of American education.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the state’s decades-old struggle over school funding reached a dramatic new chapter. On August 21, Superior Court Judge David Ruoff ruled that New Hampshire is not meeting its constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education. Even more striking, he declared the system of local property taxes — which vary dramatically from one town to another — unconstitutional. The suit, brought by Steven Rand and other taxpayers, was argued by attorneys Andru Volinsky, John Tobin, and Natalie LaFlamme, all veterans of the state’s long-running school funding battles.
Ruoff’s ruling follows a July 2025 New Hampshire Supreme Court decision that found the state’s $4,182 per pupil funding “facially unconstitutional” and called $7,356.01 per pupil “eminently reasonable.” The Rand suit, however, goes further than previous cases by targeting not just the inadequacy of state aid, but also the inequity of local tax burdens. The Claremont decisions of the 1990s established that education is a fundamental right and that the state must fund it with taxes that are “equal in valuation and uniform in rate throughout the state.” Yet, as Ruoff noted, “There is nothing fair or just about taxing a home or other real estate in one town at four times the rate that a similar property is taxed in another town to fulfill the same purpose of meeting the state’s educational duty.”
Testimony from former principals John Freeman and Corinne Cascadden painted a bleak picture. Freeman showed that even doubling the state’s share would not cover the true cost of an adequate education in Pittsfield, where teacher salaries lag far below the state average, leading to chronic recruitment and retention problems. Cascadden described Berlin’s struggle to fund a basic $18 million school budget, with only $5.6 million coming from the state and the rest falling to local taxpayers. Special Education costs are especially stark: in 2023-2024, the average cost per student was $49,812, while state aid provided only $2,100 plus the base amount — leaving 83% of Special Education funding to local property taxes.
Judge Ruoff used Pittsfield and Berlin as bellwether districts, concluding, “The plaintiffs have proven a clear and substantial conflict between the costs necessary to meet Constitutional Adequacy and current Adequacy Funding and special education differential aid and funding levels in all, or virtually all, of New Hampshire’s school districts.” He acknowledged the legislature’s role in setting policy but asserted the judiciary’s duty “to ensure that constitutional rights not be hollowed out.”
While Ruoff denied the plaintiffs’ request to immediately halt the current funding plan, anticipating a likely state appeal, he left the door open for further judicial intervention if the legislature fails to act. The ruling is a powerful reminder that, even as federal oversight falters, the courts can still play a pivotal role in demanding fairness and adequacy in public education.
Taken together, these stories reveal a system under strain: one where the very tools for measuring student progress are at risk, and where the mechanisms for funding schools remain deeply unequal. As policymakers, educators, and citizens grapple with these challenges, the stakes for America’s children — and the country’s future — could hardly be higher.
