Did Schools Start Getting Rated On The PSAT After NCLB 2001? A Teacher Breaks It Down
Last month, I sat across from Mrs. Henderson at my 7pm parent-teacher conference, the half-empty mug of cold coffee on my desk leaving a ring on my lesson plan book. Her 10th grader, Sam, is a solid B student who loves drawing dinosaurs in the margins of my handouts, and she was here to talk about PSAT scores that had come in the week before. She pulled out a printed sheet of school rankings she’d gotten from a real estate site, tapped a line next to the average PSAT score for my school, and asked the question I get once or twice every semester: “Did schools start getting rated on the PSAT after NCLB back in 2001? I remember that law changed everything with testing.”
I started teaching 10th grade in this district in 2008, seven years after No Child Left Behind was signed into law, so I watched the rollout of its requirements first hand. Back then, NCLB mandated that every state test all students in reading and math every year between 3rd and 8th grade, and once more in high school. Schools got rated based on how many students hit proficiency marks, and low ratings could mean lost funding or staff restructuring. The PSAT? Back then, it was entirely optional. Our school only ordered tests for kids who signed up to pay the small fee, mostly high-achieving students gearing up for the SAT and National Merit Scholarship consideration. The state never asked for our PSAT data, and it never factored into our official school rating. So the short answer to Mrs. Henderson’s question was no: NCLB didn’t start the practice of rating schools on PSAT scores.
But I leaned in, because the longer answer matters a lot more for parents like her who are comparing districts to move to. NCLB did something much bigger that set the stage for PSAT ratings decades later. It normalized the idea that public schools should be ranked and held accountable based on standardized test scores. Before NCLB, school ratings were usually based on things like graduation rates, extracurricular offerings, or informal word of mouth from neighbors. After NCLB, test scores became the go-to metric for judging school quality, both for policymakers and for the public.
When NCLB was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, that focus on test-based ratings stuck. Third-party school ranking sites popped up, helping parents compare schools across district and state lines. The problem? State tests are different everywhere. One state’s proficiency level isn’t the same as another’s, so ranking sites can’t easily compare them across state lines. The PSAT, though, is the same test everywhere, administered to 10th graders all over the country. It’s free for districts to administer if they opt in, so more and more districts started paying for all 10th graders to take it, to have that baseline data that aligns with national norms. Before long, ranking sites started using average PSAT scores as an easy, comparable metric to rate schools.
I pulled my laptop over to show Mrs. Henderson what I meant. She was looking at moving to a neighboring district where the average PSAT listed on the real estate site was 110 points higher than our school’s. I pulled up that district’s testing policy: they only fund the PSAT for students in honors and AP tracks. Kids in general ed or special ed don’t take it through the school, so their scores aren’t included in the average. Our district funds the PSAT for every 10th grader, no exceptions, so our average includes all kids, which pulls the number down. That 110 point difference doesn’t say our school is worse – it says they count different kids in their average.
That’s the practical part most parents don’t stop to check. After talking through this with Mrs. Henderson, I gave her a few simple steps I tell all parents who ask this question. First, start with your state department of education’s official school rating website before you rely on third-party rankings or real estate sites. Official state ratings are based on the mandatory tests that 100% of students take, so they aren’t skewed by which kids get to opt into the PSAT. Second, if you do see PSAT scores on a ranking, spend two minutes searching the district’s testing policy to see if all 10th graders are required to take it. If only some kids take it, that average isn’t a useful measure of how the school serves all students. Third, if your kid’s district requires all 10th graders to take the PSAT, take 30 seconds the night before the test to say this exact line: “Your score doesn’t go on your college transcript, and it doesn’t change how our school is rated for next year. This is just practice.” I’ve had too many 10th graders stress out for weeks over this test because they think it matters more than it does.
A week after the conference, Mrs. Henderson emailed me. She’d called the neighboring district’s guidance office and confirmed what I’d told her – they don’t include non-honors students in their reported PSAT averages. She said that changed how she thought about that district, but she and her husband are still weighing the higher cost of housing in our district against the bigger house they can afford there.
I still get this question pretty regularly. People remember that NCLB upended testing in public schools, and they’re right to connect the dots to the PSAT ratings they see now. NCLB didn’t mandate school ratings on the PSAT, but it started the shift toward test-based school ranking that eventually landed us here. There’s no big fix for parents who have to sort through all these conflicting numbers, but stopping to check what data you’re actually looking at takes just a few minutes, and it saves a lot of unnecessary worry.
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