Did Schools Start Getting Rated on the PSAT After NCLB 2001? A High School Teacher Explains
Last October, I sat across from a mom named Mia at my 10th grade parent-teacher conference, in the same room with the scuffed oak table and leftover coffee from the morning open house. She’d just pulled up her son Jake’s PSAT score report on her phone, and her thumb hovered over the screen before she asked the question I get at least a dozen times every fall. “I saw in our local parent group that ever since No Child Left Behind passed in 2001, schools get rated based on average PSAT scores. Jake’s score is fine, but your school’s average is lower than the private school down the road—should we be looking to switch?”
I was a first-year teacher in 2001, right after NCLB passed, so I remember the shift clearly. We sat through all-day training sessions, stacked piles of new paperwork on our already crowded desks, and watched the entire conversation around school quality shift to test-based ratings. Back then, our state rated schools based on the FCAT, our own homegrown standardized test given every year from 3rd to 10th grade. No one mentioned the PSAT. It was just the practice test kids took if they were gunning for National Merit scholarships, a low-stakes thing most kids didn’t even stress about.
To sort through the confusion, we have to start with what NCLB actually did. It was the first federal law that required all public schools accepting federal funding to test students annually in reading and math, and to issue public ratings of schools based on those test results. Before 2001, school ratings were rare, and rarely tied directly to standardized test scores. So it makes total sense that people connect the start of test-based school ratings to NCLB, which is where the mix-up starts. But NCLB never required schools to use the PSAT for those ratings. It left the choice of which test to use up to individual states, as long as it was a state-approved standardized test aligned to state standards.
Mia nodded, but she still looked confused. She pulled up a popular third-party school ranking site on her phone, and tapped the screen to show me: average PSAT was listed right at the top, next to our school’s overall letter grade. That’s the other big piece of the confusion, I told her. After NCLB created widespread demand for easy-to-understand school ratings, third-party sites popped up to rank schools for parents. They pull whatever test score data is publicly available, and the PSAT is one of the most widely available, because most public schools offer it to all 10th graders for free now. So even if a state doesn’t use the PSAT for official ratings, these sites often use it to calculate their own rankings, which makes parents think it’s the official measure.
When did the PSAT ever become part of official school ratings? It wasn’t until 2015, when NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, that a handful of states started switching from their own in-house state tests to the SAT or PSAT for high school accountability ratings. That’s 14 years after NCLB passed. Even now, only about a third of U.S. states use the PSAT or SAT for official school accountability ratings, and even those usually use the 11th grade SAT, not the 10th grade PSAT that most kids take for practice.
I pulled up our state’s department of education website on my laptop, clicked over to our school’s official report card, and pointed to the section that lists what tests count for our rating. It’s 3rd through 8th grade state tests, and 11th grade SAT. The PSAT isn’t there at all. I told Mia what I tell all parents who ask this question: the first thing you can do is check the official state report card directly. It takes two minutes, and it will always tell you exactly what tests count for the official rating you see on the school’s profile. If you’re looking at third-party rankings, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click their methodology link. It will spell out what data they use to rank schools, and if they’re using unadjusted PSAT averages, you can take that ranking with a grain of salt.
A second concrete step I share: if you’re comparing two schools, ask both front offices what percentage of their 10th graders took the PSAT last year. At our school, we offer it for free, but about 15% of kids opt out, either because they’re planning to take the ACT instead or just don’t want to deal with a four-hour test on a Saturday. At the private school down the road, every 10th grader is required to take it, and many take it again in 9th grade for practice. That alone pulls their average up 80 points, even when the quality of teaching is comparable.
Mia relaxed a little when she saw that our school’s official state rating was actually higher than the private school’s, and that the PSAT average the parent group was discussing didn’t matter for anything official. Jake had been talking about joining our robotics team for months, and she didn’t want to pull him out just because of a rumor. She left the conference saying she’d stop scrolling the parent group late at night, at least for a few weeks.
I’ve been teaching long enough to see how testing rules shift every five to ten years, and it’s no wonder parents get confused. NCLB did change everything when it comes to how we rate schools, that part of the rumor is true. It created the system where every public school gets a public grade based on test scores, and that system is still with us today. But the idea that the PSAT has been part of that system since 2001 just isn’t correct. It’s a confusion of timeline, mixed with third-party rankings that use whatever data they can get, mixed with social media rumors that get passed around so many times they start to feel true.
Jake ended up staying, and just last month he brought me a flier from the regional robotics competition his team qualified for, grinning about the parts they 3D printed themselves. I still get this question every conference season. Sometimes parents have heard it so many times they’re convinced it’s true, and they just need someone to walk them through the actual numbers. There’s no easy fix for the avalanche of conflicting information parents have to sort through these days. But taking five minutes to check the official source, instead of relying on a Facebook post or a third-party ranking, usually clears things up. It doesn’t answer every question you have about whether a school is right for your kid, of course. But it takes one unneeded worry off the table.
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