Feels Like Old Times

This morning, former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings does exactly what I showed last week cannot reasonably be done: She looked at the latest NAEP scores and gave No Child Left Behind (as well as similar state reforms) credit for what have been, frankly, at‐​best marginal improvements. And check out the long‐​term trend lines; you’ll see that there were periods with increases just as good as those between 1999 and 2008 that predated NCLB and most state standards‐​and‐​testing reforms. You’ll also note a few liberties taken by the former Secretary, such as the assertion that we’ve just had “nine straight years of increasing scores for elementary school students.” Yes, the scores have gone up, but we don’t know that they’ve gone up every year for nine years. We only know the trend has been up, but scores are only available for 1999, 2004, and 2008 — things could easily have fluctuated from year to year. And let’s not forget that NCLB was only enacted in 2002, took at least a year to meaningfully implement, and was pushed in large part because states weren’t reforming themselves. That alone makes it impossible to support Spellings’ rosy conclusions.


Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Thanks for the blast from the past, Secretary Spellings.