After much thought, I’ve decided that my biggest takeaway from the release of the 12th grade NAEP results earlier this week is that I feel really bad for Lesley Muldoon. She did her best to hype this release the past couple of months, but it was an uphill battle from the start. Twelfth grade NAEP, long the redheaded stepchild of our nation’s report card, was always going to be a hard sell.
Nobody expected the impending release of NAEP12 to generate the same level of buzz as the soon-to-be-released TS12 (The Life Of A Showgirl, coming October 3rd). I did, however, expect the usual level of excitement from the NAEPnuts (the NAEP equivalent of Swifties – I think it will catch on); alas that was not to be. First there was a rather perfunctory response from Andrew Ho, certified Swiftie and NAEPnut. I cut him a bit of slack given that he is on a sabbatical this year. But then there was this from Mike Petrilli in today’s edition of his new newsletter Schooled:
There was a time that I treated NAEP Day as a holiday. I’d beg reporters to share early findings with me (rarely successfully), rush out an analysis, and spend hours on social media debating what the latest ups and downs meant.
But in recent weeks, in preparation for the latest reading and math scores for twelfth graders and the latest science scores for eighth graders, all I could manage was a shrug.
OMG! Right? To paraphrase the apocryphal quote from LBJ, if we’ve lost Mike Petrilli, we’ve lost middle America and lost the war.
So, while others focus on the causes of the 12th-graders poor performance on the NAEP 12th grade Reading and Mathematics tests and what we might do about it, I find myself pondering the causes of this week’s NAEP ennui and wondering what whether there’s anything we can do to help out poor Lesley.
My first thought was that we’re just tired of receiving bad news. But then I remembered the success of Taylor Swift’s 31-track The Tortured Poet’s Department and recognized that we have an insatiable capacity for consuming angst, heartbreak, and generally depressing content.
Sticking with the TTPD theme, it occurred to me that the issue might be that the 12th grade NAEP results are “So High School.” Let’s face it, 12th graders just don’t generate the same level of concern as 4th graders. Perhaps that’s because we feel that there’s still time to affect the outcome for 4th graders. Perhaps it’s as simple as fourth grade students being more likeable than their twelfth-grade counterparts. Angsty eighth graders might provide some support for this explanation. Look at the difference in attention received when their mathematics and reading results were paired with the fourth-grade release compared to their science results being lumped in with seniors. Facts are facts.
Or perhaps we just don’t put a lot of stock in seniors taking NAEP. Back in the early days of state testing, when state assessment programs fashioned themselves after NAEP, many states abandoned the notion of administering state assessments in the middle of senior spring – shifting high school testing to 11th or 10thgrade, when kids were still a bit more motivated and there was still time to do something with the results.
Speaking of states, perhaps the lack of interest is related to the lack of state results with 12th grade NAEP. The lack of state results makes me wonder which NAEP is this. Is it the one that doesn’t give state results or is it the other one that usually does give state results? Plus, it’s simply a lot easier to generate interest with state results, even if I’m skeptical about the motivation of high school seniors taking the test. As far as I can tell, the last time we saw state-level results on the 12th grade NAEP was when a handful of state results were reported in 2013. That’s a whole generation of K-12 students ago.
2013 is also commonly cited as the high-water mark for NAEP results and uppercase Education Reform – it’s pretty much been all downhill from there. My inclination is to blame the CCSS and Race to the Top Assessment Program, but not for the usual reasons. Rather, I feel that the shift to quasi-national standards and assessments reduced the sense of ownership among states. With ownership comes buy-in, responsibility, and interest.
This was the same time that states almost universally rejected the high school tests associated with the CCSS and the assessment consortium. (California perhaps a notable exception.) They used the CCSS-aligned tests to monitor whether students were on track to college-and-career-readiness, but had other means to assess whether students were, in fact, college-and-career ready at the end of high school.
Ah, college-and-career readiness. Beginning in the early 2000s, NAGB devoted more than a decade (and presumably a lot of money) to executing an ambitious and exhaustive research agenda designed examine the relationship between NAEP, NAEP performance levels, and student readiness for college and careers. The concept of college-and-career-readiness, however, has faded over the last decade, not appearing directly in the release associated with the NAEP 12th grade results.
That release does note that college enrollments are up since 2019 although the percent of students prepared for entry-level college courses has declined. At the same time, high school graduation rates have climbed to an all-time high. Same story for access to and enrollment in AP courses. High school itself is changing before our very eyes with dual enrollment and early college programs. What to make of this?
The devil, as always, is in the details and those details all lie somewhere outside of the NAEP tests. The argument that NAEP is necessary because it is the only nationally representative indicator of student performance just doesn’t ring as true at the end of high school as it does for the fourth and eighth grade – it never has. There are so many other measures and indicators of student readiness for college and career at the end of high school. And did I mention that NAEP is not aligned to the CCSS, state standards, or for that matter, any set of standards outside of NAEP itself.
Bottom line, Lesley has enough on her plate without asking her to tout 12th grade NAEP results every few years. Let’s set aside the notion of 12th grade NAEP once and for all and allow Lesley and the rest of us to better direct and allocate our precious time, energy, and resources.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 