How Report Cards Mislead Parents
New York City parent Adriana Aviles is sounding the alarm on inflated grades in New York City schools. Aviles’s 14-year-old son consistently received high grades throughout elementary and middle school. But after he scored a 78 on a recent test, she learned he was struggling with fractions and basic algebra.
The warning signs were there. Looking carefully back at her son’s seventh-grade state exam, which she had initially ignored, Aviles discovered that he was “not proficient” in math.
Some may want to blame Aviles for failing to pay attention to test scores. She certainly takes responsibility for her oversight in an interview with the New York Post. But her reliance on report cards alone is far more common than you would think. Many parents, in New York and elsewhere, likely don’t realize that report cards often no longer reflect what their children are learning.
A 2026 working paper, based on a survey experiment of 2,079 parents, found that parents placed a higher weight on grades than test scores when considering educational decisions. Specifically, parents were more likely to consider additional academic help if report cards showed poor grades, even if test scores were high. But if report cards showed high grades while test scores were poor, parents were less likely to consider help.
A 2023 Learning Heroes survey also shows how much parents trust report cards. Sixty-four percent of respondents ranked report cards as one of the most helpful resources for understanding how their children were doing in school. Parents ranked exams toward the bottom, with only around a quarter finding them useful.
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Standards based report cards.
