Student test scores have stalled nationally. What can be done about it?
It was the height of the Bush administration, with No Child Left Behind in full swing. That was the law that required schools to regularly test their students in reading and math and sometimes face consequences based on their scores.
Schneider, then an administration education official, got used to presiding over good tidings. "It was a good news story," he recalled. "It was good for the country. How could anyone be against increased performance for minorities?"
He left the administration in 2008, and since then, as an independent researcher and a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, he's watched the results from afar, and they haven't been as good. In recent years, performance in reading and math has stagnated. The trend continues, with the release last week of math and reading scores for high school seniors.
"We're stalled," he said. "That's the bottom line."
From 2013 to 2015, reading scores for high school seniors dipped (from 288 to 287 out of 500), while math scores also went down a point (from 153 to 152 out of 300). "We're not making any progress," Schneider said. He had the same concern last fall when the government released test scores for fourth- and eighth-graders, which showed a similar pattern.
So why have Americans hit an academic wall? Can it be broken?
Schneider used to be commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the government arm charged with a loaded job: figuring out what students know, whether it's enough, and telling their parents and taxpayers how smart, or dumb, they are.
Primarily, the federal government does that through one test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The idea was simple: Create a device that purely assesses what students know, as opposed to measuring the different advantages they might have.
NAEP is now said to be the gold standard of exams. The results have no stakes for test takers or teachers — it doesn't affect funding or college admissions — so there's little incentive to game, cheat or spend hours drilling its material.
The creators of NAEP have long said that their goal lines are "aspirational." In plain English, that means that the test is Student test scores have stalled nationally. What can be done about it? - LA Times:
