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.
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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.
In the same survey, nine in ten parents thought their child was performing at or above grade level. Yet standardized testing data cited by Learning Heroes indicate that less than half of students are performing at grade level. Remarkably, among the minority of parents (10 percent) who said their child was below grade level in reading, 36 percent still reported that their child received mostly B’s or better on report cards.
While Aviles’s son fell behind in elementary and middle school, grade inflation extends to high schools, too. A 2026 Fordham Institute survey found that 44 percent of SAT and 33 percent of ACT test takers who scored at the bottom of the test distributions reported consistently receiving A’s in high school.
Why do parents prefer report cards to test scores? For many, report cards are familiar and easy to understand. Meanwhile, anti-testing messages encourage parents to dismiss test scores. Some may ask why they should take test results seriously if they are supposedly arbitrary and don’t measure what students learn in the classroom.
Even the most elite parents are prone to such ideas. In her recent New York Times essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones explains how she originally chalked up her daughter Najya’s poor state exam results to her being a bad test taker. After all, Najya received high grades in school. But after visiting an education specialist, Hannah-Jones learned that Najya struggled with basic building blocks in math, such as fractions.
Education officials have helped promote the anti-test narrative, further misleading parents. For instance, New York Board of Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams justified removing Regents exams as a graduation requirement by implying that asking some students to take tests to measure their mastery is like asking fish to climb trees—a popular trope among advocates of the idea that students have different “learning styles.” In a similar vein, New York described the state’s graduation overhaul as “accommodating diverse learning styles.”
Meanwhile, authors of a 2025 review of 17 meta-analyses of learning-styles research say that “the recent surge of interest in promoting the correlates of learning styles” is “misleading, of little value, and should be resisted.”
Education professionals have denigrated tests at the same time that they have moved to distort the meaning of grades. For instance, the New York City Department of Education encouraged principals to set a minimum grading floor of a 55 rather than a zero in its 2021 equitable-grading policy toolkit. Such distortions further diminish the value of report cards.
Report cards may have been trusted resources in the past. But they are increasingly gamed by schools. Standardized tests, meanwhile, remain an important guardrail that can save families from frustration and heartbreak. Parents should pay more attention to standardized tests results.