CURMUDGUCATION: Cheating the NAEP

CURMUDGUCATION: Cheating the NAEP:

Cheating the NAEP

We've had our giant round of reaction to the NAEP test results, and their woeful failure to showAmerican school children being propelled forward into a wonderland of learning by over a decade of reformster policies. I'm not sure there's any reason to get excited about NAEP results at all, but test-loving folks do, and there's really no denying that this round of NAEP results were Just Not Good.

Oh, but what if it turned out that they were actually even worse?

RaShawn Biddle may not be familiar to you; Biddle runs a one-man media empire parked firmly in reformsterland. But his blog Dropout Nation ran some interesting analysis of some NAEP numbers.

To understand what he's about, you need to know that NAEP allows states to opt out up to 15% of their student special population-- typically students with special needs and English Language Learners. But Biddle is a good reformster, and so he believes in the simple two-step proposition:

1) Public schools are failing. We just need to prove it so we can get support for dismantling them.
2) Making students take Big Standardized Tests who can't possible pass them-- that will help with #1.

Biddle likes to talk about "special ed ghettos" and he's a huge supporter of having all the students there fail BS Tests so we can prove that their school districts suck. But he's not wrong when he points out that some states and cities are gaming their NAEP stats by controlling who actually takes the test. Biddle has assembled two Dishonor Rolls.

On the state level, the big loser is Georgia.

The Peach State was the worst in the nation in excluding fourth- and eighth-grade kids in special ed, keeping 25 percent of each group of students from taking NAEP this year. Although the levels of exclusion declined by, respectively, six and seven percentage points from levels two years ago, CURMUDGUCATION: Cheating the NAEP: