The common mistake Betsy DeVos made about new NAEP scores — and other problems with her ‘sky is falling’ narrative - The Washington Post

The common mistake Betsy DeVos made about new NAEP scores — and other problems with her ‘sky is falling’ narrative - The Washington Post

The common mistake Betsy DeVos made about new NAEP scores — and other problems with her ‘sky is falling’ narrative

It never fails.

Results from a standardized test deemed important to the future of education are released — and new cries ring out that “the sky is falling” in U.S. education. We heard some of that with the Wednesday release of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, which showed only two jurisdictions — the District and Mississippi — experienced big boosts in student scores.

There went Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who said in a speech (see full text below), “The numbers are reason for deep concern. This country has a student achievement crisis.”

And there went Jeanne Allen, founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Center for Education Reform, who also viewed the results as definitive proof of failure. She said in a statement: “The NAEP proficiency scores announced today should be shocking to every family, employer, and policymaker. They demonstrate that the vast majority of our nation’s education systems are simply failing to meet the very basic educational needs of American students, threatening their dreams for the future.”

NAEP, administered by an agency of the Education Department, is a set of exams sometimes referred to as “the nation’s report card” or the “gold standard” in student assessment. It is seen as the most consistent nationally representative measure of student achievement since the 1990s and is said to be able to assess what students “know and can do.”

U.S. students in the fourth and eighth grades — said to be randomly chosen at selected schools — take NAEP every two years, and high school students do so less frequently. Math and reading tests are given every other year, while assessments in science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, technology and engineering literacy, and U.S. history are administered less frequently.

NAEP results are highly anticipated in the education world and are often seen as a benchmark for progress in school systems — even though the results are often misinterpreted, as DeVos did in a speech Wednesday about the scores.

She said: “Our nation’s report card shows that two-thirds of American students can’t read at grade level. Two out of three!”

If she were being graded in score interpretation, she would flunk. NAEP doesn’t assess grade-level reading. It has its own markers of progress: NAEP Basic, NAEP Proficient and NAEP Advanced. The new results show that two-thirds of students who took the 2019 reading test did not read at the CONTINUE READING: The common mistake Betsy DeVos made about new NAEP scores — and other problems with her ‘sky is falling’ narrative - The Washington Post

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