The Nation’s Report Card and NCLB: Friends or Foes?
The 2011 results are out on the Nation’s Report Card—also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—and the headlines emphasize the stability in student performance over the past few years in reading and math across the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
To be sure, more states posted gains than losses, and a few showed gains in both the fourth-grade and the eighth-grade in reading 0r math—or, in the laudable case of Hawaii, in both reading and math. But the national gains posted between 2009 and 2011 are statistically significant mainly because of the large sample size—roughly 200,000 students nationally for each of the fourth-grade and eighth-grade assessments in reading and math—not because of the absolute magnitude of the gains, which was quite small (on average, one point on the NAEP scale of 0 to 500).
Trends over the two-year period separating one NAEP administration from the next don’t tell us