Did Schools Start Getting Rated on PSAT After NCLB 2001? A Teacher Explains
The last parent-teacher conference of the night ran 15 minutes over, and the coffee pot in the conference room had been cold since 2 p.m. Karen, mom of my 10th grade student Mia, leaned forward and pulled a crumpled screenshot out of her tote bag. It was the local paper’s annual “Top 10 High Schools in Our Area” ranking, and our school was 12 spots lower than it had been three years ago. “I heard all this test-based school rating started with No Child Left Behind in 2001,” she said. “Did schools start getting rated on PSAT specifically after that? I don’t remember this when my oldest was in high school.”
I get this question often enough that I’ve had time to sort through the timeline, and it starts with my own first year of teaching, 2001. I was 22, fresh out of college, my classroom bulletin board was covered in lumpy construction paper, and I spent three whole days of that first summer break in a windowless district conference room training on Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. That was the core requirement of NCLB: every state had to test reading and math in grades 3 through 8, and once in high school. Schools were rated based on how many students hit proficiency benchmarks on those state-made tests, and schools that missed their targets multiple years faced consequences.
NCLB never mentioned the PSAT at all. Back then, the PSAT was mostly for high-achieving 11th graders who wanted to qualify for National Merit scholarships. Most kids didn’t take it, and no one was looking at school-wide averages to rate how good a school was. So the short answer to Karen’s question is no—NCLB didn’t directly require schools to be rated on the PSAT. But the longer, more accurate answer is that NCLB created the entire system that led to PSAT school ratings happening 15 years later.
Before 2001, when people talked about how good a school was, they mostly mentioned things like graduation rates, how many kids went to four-year college, or the football team’s win record. NCLB changed that default: it made standardized test scores the official measure of school quality. The public got used to the idea that a single set of test numbers could tell you everything you needed to know about a school. That culture stuck around even when NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, which gave states more flexibility in how they rated schools.
By that point, independent ranking groups like U.S. News and local media outlets were already looking for a standardized test they could use to compare schools across state lines. State tests are all different—what counts as proficient in one state is below average in another, and many states were caught lowering cut scores to make their schools look better. The PSAT is scored the same way across the entire country, so it looked like an easy, neutral solution. By the mid-2010s, most national and many local rankings started using average PSAT scores as a core factor in their school ratings. That’s how we got to where we are now.
I saw this play out firsthand at my school five years ago. Our district decided to pay for every 10th grader to take the PSAT for free, to get more low-income kids thinking early about college. Before that, only kids who could pay the fee themselves—mostly high-achieving kids from middle-class families—took the test. Our participation rate jumped from 52% to 94% that first year. Our average PSAT score dropped 18 points, and we dropped 18 spots in the local ranking the next year. Nothing about our teaching changed. Our graduation rate went up 3% that year, and our college acceptance rate for low-income students went up 7%. None of that moved the needle on the ranking, because the ranking only cared about that average PSAT.
That’s the main thing I tell parents who ask me about this connection between NCLB and PSAT ratings. It’s an unintended side effect, not an intentional rule, and it means these ratings are almost always misleading. Instead of just taking the ranking at face value, I tell parents to do three quick concrete things. First, go to the school’s public profile and do the math: how many 11th graders are enrolled, and how many took the PSAT that year? If participation is below 70%, the average is skewed to only include high-performing kids, so it doesn’t tell you anything about how the school serves all students. Second, if your kid is aiming for National Merit recognition, skip the average and ask the guidance office for the last three years of raw data: how many students from the school got commended or semifinalist status? A high average can hide a small number of top kids, just like a lower average can have just as many high scorers spread across the student body. Third, if your kid isn’t aiming for National Merit, just ignore the average PSAT entirely. It won’t tell you how well the school supports struggling readers, how good the arts program is, or how safe kids feel between classes—all the things that actually matter most for most kids.
Karen nodded as I talked, and said she’d been thinking of switching Mia to the higher-ranked school across town, but didn’t want to pull her away from her best friends and the theater program Mia’s loved since ninth grade. I wrote down the name of our free after-school PSAT prep workshop, offered to connect her with our guidance counselor to go over recent honors college acceptance numbers from our school, and she said she’d sleep on it.
I locked the conference room door and walked out to the parking lot, where the streetlights were already on. I get this question at least once a month now, and it still strikes me how a 22-year-old law that never once mentioned the PSAT ended up reshaping how parents pick schools, how districts spend their budgets, and how we define a “good school” at all. There’s no quick fix for the messy system we ended up with. All I can do is answer the question, point parents to the specific details that matter for their kid, and keep untangling the unintended consequences one conference at a time.
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