Telling the Truth About NAEP Scores
When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released the 12th grade reading scores last week, the supporters of the status quo were hard pressed to come up with anything positive to say. Because reading scores have flat-lined, the best that the defenders of our ‘evolutionary’ approach to school reform could do was talk about how the new Common Core State Standards are poised to make a huge difference. For example, former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, now the head of the Alliance for Excellent Education, cited the low scores as proof of the “desperate need for the aggressive implementation” of the standards. Keep on keeping on, he seemed to be saying, and don’t look back.
Another interpretation from establishment circles suggested the low scores are actually evidence of thesuccess of the country’s’ “Stay in School” effort; that insight came from the acting Commissioner of the US Department of Education’s statistics office, who suggested that scores were lower because kids who before the “Stay in School” push would have dropped out were now staying in school–and apparently doing badly on tests. Our success is making us look bad, he seemed to be saying.
But while the supporters of the Common Core may see the dismal results as reason to push harder in the same direction, others say we should look carefully at what the past dozen or so years of increased high stakes testing and test-based accountability (for students and teachers) have produced.[1] Perhaps it’s time to rethink what we have been doing since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001? After all, it’s now 2014, so we have a lot of data.
The left–eager to scrap NCLB and its successor, Race to the Top–is using these NAEP results to support its argument. Here’s Guy Brandenburg’s analysis. In his blog, he asks, ‘Just how flat are those 12th grade NAEP scores?’ His answer, in part: “The short answer is: those scores have essentially not changed since they began giving the tests! Not for the kids at the top of the testing heap, not for those at the bottom, not for blacks, not for whites, not for hispanics.
What Mr. Brandenburg has done is look for long-term patterns, something those in authority are not prone to do. I think it’s significant to consider what NAEP data can tell us about performance differences among racial groups (‘the achievement gap’) over time–but not just in 12th grade reading but in 4th and 8th grades as well.
NAEP generally tests a sample of 4th and 8th grade students in math and reading every few years. What I have done in the chart below is put the District of Columbia’s 2013 scores against the earliest available data for each category. (I used different years because in some years the District [2] did not have enough White kids to allow for comparisons.) What you will see is that, although the gap has grown smaller in three of the four categories, it remains the largest in the nation–by far–in all four categories:
These bad numbers may be news to you, because politicians, educators and editorial pages have notTelling the Truth About NAEP Scores | Taking Note: