Education Next – Matthew M. Chingos and Kristin Blagg
“Yesterday’s release of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) means that pundits, politicians, and, yes, even some researchers, will soon begin the biennial exercise of making unwarranted inferences from the NAEP results. We draw on a new Urban Institute report to show, first, how to make more responsible comparisons across states and, second, that the declines in NAEP scores from 2013 to 2015 are unlikely to be explained by shifts in student demographics. NAEP, often called the “nation’s report card,” is the only standardized test regularly administered to a nationally representative sample of U.S. students. Unfortunately, “misNAEPery” has become common practice, with education stakeholders touting high-scoring states that have adopted their preferred policies, or low-scoring states that have done the opposite. The fundamental problem is that there’s no widely accepted way to factor student demographics into state NAEP scores. The Urban Institute’s new report, Breaking the Curve: Promises and Pitfalls of Using NAEP Data to Assess the State Role in Student Achievement, proposes better ways to compare NAEP scores across states and over time.”(more)