Outcomes Are Up. Trust Is Down. What Are We Actually Producing?
In this Article
- Are some of the headline outcomes genuinely stronger?
- Has trust not followed?
- Is the field already moving on the right question?
- The next challenge is not definition. It is infrastructure.
- The work ahead is not to replace the old outcomes. It is to complete them.
- What should district leaders take from this?
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Campbell’s warning was not against outcomes. It was against letting a visible metric stand in for the whole purpose of an institution. That matters here because public education has several outcomes that are real, important, and worth protecting, while still being too narrow to answer the larger question people are really asking: what kind of young person is the system actually producing?
Are some of the headline outcomes genuinely stronger?
Some major outcomes have clearly improved. In the United States, the public high school graduation rate rose from 80 percent in 2011–12 to 87 percent in 2021–22. Postsecondary completion has also held at a relatively stable level, with the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reporting a 61.1 percent six-year college completion rate for the fall 2019 cohort, steady for several cohorts in a row. Those are not trivial gains. Completion matters. Persistence matters.
At the same time, other outcomes remain warning lights. The U.S. Department of Education says chronic absenteeism reached about 31 percent in 2021–22 and then declined to 28 percent in 2022–23, still far above pre-pandemic norms. NAEP’s 2024 mathematics results showed some improvement at grade 4 compared with 2022, no significant change at grade 8, and grade 12 math still below 2019. So the picture is not that everything is up. It is mixed. Some of the most visible completion measures improved over the past decade. Some current performance and participation measures remain weak or unstable. zero.
Has trust not followed?
What makes this more interesting is that trust has not risen alongside the stronger completion measures. The 2025 PDK poll found that only 43 percent of respondents gave their own community’s schools an A or B, down from 53 percent in 2013, while only 13 percent gave the nation’s public schools an A or B, down from 26 percent in 2004.
If graduation is up and trust is down, then one possibility is that the public is missing the good news. Another possibility is that the metrics, while real, are not capturing enough of what people mean when they ask whether schools are doing well. That is the more interesting question.
Results still matter. They just no longer do all the work. If the public scoreboard is too narrow to reflect the fuller purpose schools are trying to serve, institutions can make real progress and still lose confidence. That is not only an outcomes problem. It is also a legibility problem.
Is the field already moving on the right question?
Many district leaders are already working on this. Portrait of a Graduate is one strong example, but it is part of a broader effort to update what success means. AASA describes Portrait of a Graduate as a shared vision of student success that reflects community aspirations and future-ready life skills, and says districts need support not only with defining the portrait, but with aligning systems, practice, and measurement around it. AASA also frames this work as a progression from Portrait of a Graduate to Portrait to Practice to Portrait to Impact and Measure What Matters.
That matters because it shows the field is not stuck in a narrow completion mindset. In many districts, leaders are already asking what graduates should actually know, be able to do, and become. The deeper question is already on the table.
The next challenge is not definition. It is infrastructure.
The harder phase now is not whether to write a better portrait or a better graduate profile. It is whether districts can build the infrastructure around those updated outcomes so they can be trusted, measured, improved, and communicated over time.
AASA’s current work points directly at that challenge. Portrait to Practice is about translating vision into daily practice and district coherence. Measure What Matters is explicit about building meaningful, multi-measure systems that reflect well-being, life skills, engagement, readiness, and real-world competencies, not just academic performance. Portrait to Impact adds a related emphasis on collecting evidence and stories of student growth and demonstrating real-world application.
That is the path. The question is no longer only what outcomes matter. The question is whether districts can align students, families, educators, and boards around those outcomes, gather enough data and voice to know where the system is falling short, and then communicate progress and setbacks clearly enough that the public can see the updated promise in motion rather than only hear new language. If broader outcomes do not live inside the strategic plan, the reporting rhythm, the assessment system, and the improvement cycle, they are easy to dismiss as aspiration. If they do, they become part of how a district learns and part of how a community regains confidence that the system knows what it is trying to produce.
The work ahead is not to replace the old outcomes. It is to complete them.
Graduation still matters. University completion still matters. Attendance still matters. Math still matters.
But the more useful question is how to place those measures inside a broader and more intelligible account of student success. Not graduation instead of durable skills. Graduation plus durable skills. Not math instead of agency. Math plus agency. Not attendance instead of belonging. Attendance plus belonging. AASA’s own framing now moves in that direction by pairing Portrait of a Graduate with Portrait to Practice and measuring what matters most.
There is research support for that broader frame. The CDC says students who feel connected to school are more likely to have better attendance, higher grades and test scores, and to graduate. Brookings found that many students report much lower belonging and engagement than adults assume. RAND found that district leaders themselves see meaning and relevance as part of the attendance challenge, especially for older students. In other words, some of the broader outcomes districts are trying to name are not peripheral to the conventional measures. They are part of what produces them.
This is evolution, not revolution. The strongest districts are not throwing away traditional outcomes. They are widening the frame, grounding it in voice and evidence, and building a more complete public account of what success actually means.
What should district leaders take from this?
- Keep tracking graduation, college completion, attendance, and academic performance.
- Put those measures beside one another instead of letting any single one stand in for the whole purpose of schooling.
- Use broader frameworks, whether Portrait of a Graduate or other local efforts, to align students, families, educators, and boards around the fuller outcomes your community believes matter.
- Build multi-measure systems that combine data and voice so the district can see where the current system is falling short against those broader outcomes.
- Connect that work to the district’s real governance rhythm so it shapes decisions, not just aspirations.
- Communicate successes and failures clearly enough that the community can see the updated promise in motion, not just hear the language.
Many district leaders are already asking the right question. The work now is to make the answer visible.
