Federal test collects family data on NC students but never reports it

For more than a decade, the Nation’s Report Card has asked North Carolina students who lives at home with them. But it has never reported the answers publicly.

That omission was flagged by a new report released July 24 by the American Enterprise Institute. The report argues that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) should begin publishing student outcomes by family structure alongside categories already reported nationally, including race and ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, disability status, and English-learner status.

“This omission deprives policymakers, educators, professionals, and parents of valuable insights into one of the most powerful predictors of academic success,” wrote the authors, AEI senior fellow Ian Rowe, University of Virginia sociologist and AEI nonresident senior fellow Brad Wilcox, and Institute for Family Studies research fellow Grant Bailey.

According to the report, since 2013 NAEP’s student questionnaire has asked test-takers whether a list of adults lived in their home, including mother, father, stepmother, stepfather, and foster or other legal guardians.

The question has appeared nationally on questionnaires for mathematics, reading, science, civics, geography, and US history in grades four, eight, and 12 through 2024, the report says.

Those five categories are required by federal law. NAEP reports six more that are not: a socioeconomic status index, parental education, school type, charter status, school location, and region of the country. Family structure is not among them.

The report argues the legal requirement sets a floor rather than a ceiling, and that NAEP “is not necessarily prohibited from reporting student scores by additional categories.”

“The AEI report certainly caught my eye,” said Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation. “The point of collecting data is to report it and use it for policymaking. Why would you collect data and not report it is a question only NAEP researchers can answer.”

Luebke added that the omission may be “yet another example where politics is driving policy.”

What the report found

Because the authors couldn’t analyze the family-level NAEP scores, they turned to a different federal survey — the National Survey of Children’s Health. Those data, drawn from 2022 through 2024, compared children from what the authors termed “intact” homes — those headed by married birth or adoptive parents — with children living with stepparents, single parents, cohabiting parents, foster parents, or relatives such as grandparents.

What that survey shows, the authors argue, is the reason NAEP should report the data it already has.

Among children ages 6 to 17, the report found that 74% of those in intact, married-parent homes earned A’s and B’s or better, compared with 60% of other children. Roughly 20% of children in intact homes had a parent contacted by the school over a behavioral or learning problem in the previous year, compared with 30% of other children. Diagnosed depression was reported for 3.4% of children in intact homes and 7.9% of others.

After controlling for race, income, parental education, sex, and age, the authors found children outside intact married-parent homes were 13% less likely to have received A’s and B’s, 47% more likely to have had a parent contacted by their school, and more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with depression. On each measure, the report says, family structure was a stronger predictor than race, family income, or sex.

The authors caution that their findings “are not necessarily general results” and write that further study is needed to determine how broadly the pattern holds.

Where North Carolina stands

North Carolina ranks 23rd among the states on the 2026 Family Structure Index, a separate ranking published by the Institute for Family Studies and the Center for Christian Virtue. Wilcox and Bailey are its lead authors.

Using three-year averages for 2022 through 2024, the index puts 55.6% of North Carolina adults ages 25 to 54 as married, compared with 57% nationally, and 61.6% of North Carolina teens as being raised by married parents, compared with 63% nationally. The state’s total fertility rate is 1.68. North Carolina’s index score is 88.6, slightly above the current national score of 87.3 and below the index’s year-2000 benchmark of 100.

Among nearby states, North Carolina ranks ahead of Tennessee at 24th, South Carolina at 28th,  and Georgia at 37th. Virginia ranks 18th. Utah ranks first nationally, while New Mexico is last.

North Carolina’s own accountability system does not break student results out by family structure, either. Under the state’s 2024–25 accountability rules, schools receive performance grades for six racial and ethnic groups — American Indian, Asian, black, Hispanic, two or more races, and white — along with economically disadvantaged students, English learners, and students with disabilities.

The Department of Public Instruction also reports results for four groups that do not receive performance grades: military-connected students, academically or intellectually gifted students, homeless students, and students in foster care.

“Federal test collects family data on NC students but never reports it” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.