So I'm that person, the person you don't want to sit next to at a dinner party. I cannot tell you how many times my husband's given me the look as I am talking on and on about a new piece of research we're fielding on something like educational inequity in America. Apparently（显然地） it can be a bit of a buzzkill on a Saturday night. This is a weekday. And I am so excited and such a privilege（特权） to be here and tell you about an issue that's near and dear to my heart, which is ensuring（保证） that all of our kids can learn and that all of our kids are set up for success in life. So what if I told you that if we asked one single question, that if every parent, grandparent and guardian（[法] 监护人） asked one question, we could profoundly（深深地） change public education?

  Is my child on grade level in reading and in math? So let me explain. About a decade ago, a dear colleague and I started a nonprofit focused on education and specifically focused on parents called learning heroes. We were about halfway（到一半） through our careers and we were knee deep in policy. And time and again, we'd come out of a meeting and realized that parents had been completely dismissed（解散）, unrecognized as a part of the solution to anything we were discussing. At the same time, she and I were raising our boys in the public school and we were frustrated（挫败）.

  Even though we did this work for a living, we didn't know how our kids were doing, which felt crazy. So the first thing we did with this nonprofit is we just decided to engage（使从事于） in a giant piece of research. My former（在前的） boss, the secretary of education, used to say, in God we trust（相信）. All others bring data（资料）. And we wanted data. But we wanted to ask the kinds of questions you don't usually hear in a piece of research.

  Things like, what keeps you up at night? What are your hopes and your dreams for your child? How confident are you that they're going to get there? How engaged are you in your school? What does that look like? We talked to thousands of parents across pretty much every demographic（人口统计学的）.

  We did focus groups in English and in Spanish. And we met with Black families and Hispanic（西班牙的） families separately because we wanted to create a safe place where they could come together and talk about things that were hard, like bias（偏见） and lower expectations（期待） and unfair disciplinary practices. Things that our Black and Brown families have told us are really unique（唯一的） to their experience. And so we pulled all this research together and we learned something so shocking and so hard to believe that we actually turned around into the same piece of research the following year. So I'm going to tell you what we learned. Are you ready?

  Ninety percent of all parents in the U.S. think their students are at or above grade level. Ninety percent, seriously. Nine and ten in America think their kids are okay academically（学业上）. Let's think about that. So as you guys know, the headlines, they tell a completely different story.

  Our nation is experiencing unprecedented（空前的） declines（ 消减） in reading and in math skills. If you look at our national assessment（评估） of educational progress, you'll see that only 29 percent of our students are proficient（熟练的） in reading and only 26 percent in math. And if you look at these statewide tests, which many of you guys are familiar with and have probably been annoyed by, in our state, it's called the STAR. And the kids take them in the spring, they get the results in the summer. And if you look, say, at the District（区） of Columbia（哥伦比亚）, so in the District of Columbia, 10 percent of eighth grade students are proficient in math. 84 percent of parents think they are.

  That 10 percent number is real. And it feels crazy that parents don't know. They deserve（应受） to know. So lastly（最后）, there's the Center for Education Policy Research. They've been tracking（ 跟踪） learning loss across the country during the pandemic（全国流行的）. And what they've been surfacing is real inequity.

  Because what they're finding is that districts and schools that are just two miles apart can have almost a year's difference in learning. So no matter the measure, whether it's federal（联邦的） or state or district（区）, the data is really clear. So here's my headline. My headline is that the students in the United States of America are not on track and that parents have no idea. So you're probably saying, how is this possible? That's because parents believe report cards.

  They're the holy（神圣的） grail of parent information. They're the primary thing we look at. And for some, they're the only thing they have access to. So here's what we know from the research. 80 percent of all parents say their child is receiving Bs or better. 80 percent.

  But here's the big reveal（揭露）. Grades do not equal grade level. They say it one more time. Grades do not equal grade level. Grades represent a lot of important things. Homework, participation（参与）, behavior, whether or not you showed up for class, and the mastery（精通） of the things we actually need kids to learn and understand.