National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for fourth and eighth grade math and reading were released Tuesday, and showed little change from 2009. In math, scores for both fourth and eighth grade were up one point, and in reading, fourth grade scores were unchanged while eighth grade scores improved one point. Valerie Strauss notes that the achievement gap between white and black students was essentially unchanged, while the gap between white and Hispanic eighth graders narrowed slightly.
The question is what to make of these results. Shankerblog's Matthew Di Carlo makes a strong case for not over-interpreting the results:
What I would like to see is for people on both “sides” to acknowledge that, no matter how the results turn out, they can’t be used to draw even moderately strong inferences about what works and what doesn’t. The main NAEP assessments provide a snapshot of math and reading performance among fourth and eighth graders at a single point in time. Even broken down by subgroup, the data can mask serious shifts in the conditions and characteristics of students taking the test. This is especially true given that the past two years are marked by severe economic hardship among U.S. families, as well as massive budget cuts to public education.
Strauss suggests that, though the NAEP is a higher-quality test than many standardized tests administered in the states,
...it is important to remember that even NAEP has its critics, some of whom point out that the test cannot measure many of the qualities students must develop to be successful, and others who say that the NAEP definition of “proficiency” is unnaturally high.
In fact, one study conducted by a former acting director of the National Center for Education Statistics showed that most of the countries that participate in the international tests called TIMSS would not do well under NAEP’s definition of proficiency.
It may be time to reconsider just how much stock we put in the NAEP scores.
The little-changed scores provide a blank slate for people to interpret according to their own policy agendas, and the fact that policymakers are pushing testing as the answer to all things educational means it's almost inevitable that every test will be over-interpreted.