State Standards, Mapping the NAEP, & Student Performance: Who's the "Liar"?
Last time, I challenged the reformy notion that higher standards a priori lead to better test-based performance. The basis for my challenge is a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics: "Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results From the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments."
The fine folks at NCES look at the proficiency levels set on the various state tests across the nation, then map those levels on to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Since a representative sample of students across the nation take the NAEP, we can look at what a student deemed "proficient" gets as a minimum score on the national test in one state, and compare it to what a student in a different state would have to get to be "proficient" there.
Folks who complain about the "honesty gap" seem to think it's a big deal that states not "lie" to their students:
Parents deserve the truth. But unfortunately, in most states there is a significant gap between the NAEP scores and what states report as their proficiency rate. This “Honesty Gap” is not new and something many states acknowledged years ago.
We are on the right road to fixing this problem. Today, many states are mid-stream in taking the steps needed to address the Honesty Gap – mainly, the adoption of rigorous, comparable standards and high-quality assessments that give parents real information.
We can’t go backwards. Opponents of Common Core and high quality tests want to take states and the country backward. They offer no alternative plan- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/07/state-standards-mapping-naep-student_28.html#sthash.clxiAL2s.dpuf