Battle over standardized testing emerges amid Ohio’s 62.2% educational gains

The new 2026 Ohio School Report Cards, released amid the teacher unions’ growing battle to reduce standards, show significant gains in student academic achievement.

Statewide English language arts proficiency hit 62.2%, the best mark in five years, after the first full year of required Science of Reading instruction. Math proficiency also reached a five-year high at 56.4%.

Gov. Mike DeWine called the literacy jump a “tremendous accomplishment.” Education and Workforce Director Stephen D. Dackin said every measured student subgroup improved in English language arts.

Amid these advances, however, these same tests sit at the center of a larger fight over how Ohio judges schools.

The National Education Association has argued that report cards lean too hard on a few high-stakes tests, which it alleges reinforce white supremacy as “instruments of racism and a biased system.” In response to the announcement, Ohio’s NEA Chapter President Jeff Wensing said the state’s report card scores “still rely heavily on standardized testing.”

“Standardized test results have always been closely tied to poverty levels more than school quality, and even in the most affluent communities, standardized test scores are always just a snapshot in time in a student’s life rather than a meaningful reflection of understanding or ability,” Wensing said.

Wensing added: “Much more work is needed to make these report cards truly useful tools for Ohio families and policymakers.”

In collaboration with FairTest, the NEA has created a new framework for standardized state testing that calls upon policymakers to “Remove high-stakes consequences from standardized tests.”

That push includes having states drop all tests above the federal minimum, drop graduation and retention rubrics tied to a single score, eliminate the use of standardized test results to rate teachers, principals and superintendents and give more weight to “shared communities of practice.”

The state’s merit-focused tests, which track student achievement by school, show a five-year high across multiple benchmarks. However, those gains do not reflect at least two Columbus City Schools, which are exclusively represented by the OEA.

Independence High School and Walnut Ridge High School, which operate under the district’s Master Agreement with the union, self-reported anomalies in state test results. Those flagged anomalies are under investigation for possible cellphone and smart-device use during testing, as well as questions about proctor preparation.

The state, which has since widened its investigation, moved to invalidate roughly 8,500 of 2.4 million tests.

That investigation neither erases the statewide 62.2% jump in literacy proficiency nor proves that cheating occurred. It does, however, mean some schools remain unrated while the teachers’ union urges lawmakers to avoid consequences.