Tennessee and Its Most Recent Performance on the NAEP
Following up on three posts over the past few months — the first about Tennessee Commissioner Huffman’s (un)inspiring TEDxNashville talk in which he vociferously celebrated Tennessee students’ recent (albeit highly questionable) gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores, the second about Huffman’s (and the Tennessee Department of Education’s) unexpected postponement of the release of its state-level (TCAP) standardized test scores, test scores that were, by law, to account for 15 to 25 percent of Tennessee students’ final grades, and the third about some of the “behind the scenes” details surrounding what might actually be going on in Tennessee – it seems Tennessee’s most recent NAEP scores are in!
Recall that two years after Commissioner Huffman arrived “Tennessee’s kids had the most growth of any kids in America” on the NAEP. This was celebrated by both U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama, as evidence that tying accountability measures to teacher-level growth in fact works to increase student achievement.
Well, as per the most recent NAEP scores just released, Tennessee students’ mathematics and reading scores have gone, more or less, flat. More specifically, and as per Gary Rubenstein’s recent post, in Tennessee “3-8 Reading dropped from 50.3% to Tennessee and Its Most Recent Performance on the NAEP |: