This morning the latest scores from the 4th and 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress – the so-called Nation’s Report Card – came out, and the story isn’t very good, at least upon first examination. Average scores in 4th and 8th grade math, and in 8th grade reading, were down from 2013, and essentially stagnant in 4th grade reading.
Of course, there is a lot you cannot tell about school systems from looking just at NAEP scores. Numerous variables that affect academic outcomes, ranging from demographic changes to cultural shifts, can have important impacts on scores. But it is sobering to see national test scores stagnate or drop, and at the very least the scores should put a damper on some of the declarations of success we’ve seen in the past from people like U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in 2013 credited state transitions to the Common Core national curriculum standards for upticks that year.
Perhaps a look at Kentucky, which has been held up as a success story for adopting the Core ahead of all other states and seeing increases on its state tests, is telling. Kentucky may well be seeing improvements, but the NAEP exams, for many people, serve as something of an external audit to see if states’ own tests are producing deceptive information. Of course there can be legitimate disagreements about what test is better – and if testing is even a good way to measures success – but many people who support the Core see state tests as dishonest if they differ markedly in their results from NAEP. So NAEP is important to them. Well, now, while seeing rising scores in 4th grade reading, Kentucky has seen falling scores in 8th grade math and reading, and stagnant scores in 4th grade math. Does that mean the Common Core, or anything else they are doing in Kentucky, necessarily doesn’t work? No. But it does furnish evidence that contradicts the simplistic message of, “Look at Kentucky – the Common Core works!”
There is much that NAEP is too limited to tell us definitively, but the same goes for any single measure of education. And we should be concerned whenever we see scores go down.