“The administrations in charge,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).

Deleuze’s generalization about “supposedly necessary reforms” serves as an important entry point into the perpetual education crisis in the US. Since A Nation at Risk, public education has experienced several cycles of crisis that fuel ever-new and ever-different sets of standards and high-stakes testing.

Even more disturbing is that for at least a century, “the administrations in charge” have shouted that US children cannot read—with the current reading crisis also including the gobsmacking additional crisis that teachers of reading do not know how to teach reading.

The gasoline that is routinely tossed on the perpetual fire of education crisis is test scores—state accountability tests, NAEP, SAT, ACT, etc.

While all that test data itself may or may not be valuable information for both how well students are learning and how to better serve those students through reform, ultimately all that testing has almost nothing to do with either of those goals; in fact, test data in the US are primarily fuel for that perpetual state of crisis.

Here is the most recent example—2023 ACT scores:

I have noted that reactions and overreactions to NAEP in recent years follow a similar set of problems found in reactions/overreactions to the SAT for many decades; the lessons from those reactions include:

• Lesson: Populations being tested impact data drawn from tests.
• Lesson: Ranking by test data must account for population differences among students tested. 
• Lesson: Conclusions drawn from test data must acknowledge purpose of test being used (see Gerald Bracey). 

The social media and traditional media responses to 2023 ACT data expose a few more concerns about media, public, and political misunderstanding of test data as well as how “the administrations in charge” depend on manipulating test data to insure the perpetual education crisis.

Many people have confronted the distorting ways in which the ACT data are being displayed; certainly the mainstream graph from Axios above suggests “crisis”; however, by simply modifying the X/Y axes, that same data appear at least less dramatic and possibly not even significant if the issues I list above are carefully considered.

Many causal elements could be at work to explain the ACT decrease, including population shifts, social influences (such as the Covid impact), and the inherently problematic element of using test data for purposes not intended as well as making nuanced claims based on singular data points (averages).

For example, the ACT is exclusively designed to measure college preparedness, like the SAT, and not general educational quality of schools or general evaluations of student learning.

Students who take the ACT are a narrow subset of students skewed by region and academic selectivity (college-bound students versus general population of US students).

Also, while a careful analysis could answer these questions, the ACT score drop may or may not represent a significant event, depending on what that single point (average) represents (how many questions and how large is the change substantively).

Likely, however, there is never any credible reason to respond to college entrance data as a crisis of general educational quality because, as noted above, that simply is not what the tests are designed to measure.

The larger issue remains: Testing in the US rarely serves well evaluating learning and teacher, testing has not functioned in service of achieving effective education reform, but testing does fuel perpetual education crisis.

This crisis-of-the-day about the ACT parallels the central problem with NAEP, a test that seems designed to mislead and not inform since NAEP’s “Proficient” feeds a false narrative that a majority of students are not on grade level as readers.

The ACT crisis graph being pushed by mainstream media is less a marker of declining educational quality in the US and more further proof that “the administrations in charge” want and need testing data to justify “supposedly necessary reforms,” testing as gas for the perpetual education crisis fire.