As the nation stumbles toward the 250th anniversary of its independence this summer, I find myself pondering the hypothetical,
“What if the founding fathers, in conjunction with declaring independence from Great Britain, had established a national assessment of their new nation’s educational progress?”
The idea’s not that far-fetched. By the time that the Declaration of Independence was being signed in 1776, public education had existed in the colonies for more than a century. John Adams, a driving force for independence, surely had visions of the 90th-10th percentile gap in mind when he stated, “before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society nearer to the higher.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, proponent of free and public education for children regardless of gender, stated, “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” And as to the importance of regularly monitoring educational progress, we have the cautionary words of the sage Benjamin Franklin, “without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
So, let’s imagine that as a rider to the Declaration, the Continental Congress established a national assessment in July 1776. The obvious question that must be asked, the elephant in the room, is whether we would still be trying to preserve a 250-year-old trend line when the results of the 2026 NAEP results are reported.
“A 250-year trend? Absurd!” you say.
Perhaps.
But how much more absurd than a 36-year Main NAEP trend back to 1990? (And no, you scalists, the answer is not 6.94 times more absurd.)
- A trend back to a time of limited accommodations and consequently, the exclusion from testing of students requiring accommodations.
- A trend back to a time of paper-and-pencil testing.
- A trend back to a time before federal law beginning with IASA required state content standards, achievement standards, and criterion-referenced state assessments in elementary, middle, and high school.
- A trend back to a time before WYSIWIG systems, smart phones, social media, high-speed internet, streaming, and the WNBA.
- A trend back to a time when the US population was 36% smaller, much younger, much less diverse, and much less foreign-born.
Or really, how much more absurd than a 50-year Long Term Trend trend (yes, that’s the correct phrasing) back to the early 1970s? A trend back to a time before all of the things mentioned above plus,
- A time before pocket calculators, when we were still taught in math class how to use a slide rule, compute square roots, and use a log table.
- A time when we thought that the best way to teach place value was to include systems other than the decimal system (e.g., binary, Base 5, Base 8,
- A time before personal computers with word processors, when papers were handwritten in cursive (drafts in pencil, final versions in pen).
- A time when 21st century skills were 30 years in the future and not 30 years in the past.
- A time when the high school graduation rate reached an all-time high of nearly 80% and approximately half of American adults had completed four years of high school.
- A time when we were regularly landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth.
- A time when <5% of households had more than one phone line, <10% had cable TV, and nearly half had only one car.
- A time when streaming music meant setting the dial on your transistor radio to the AM Top 40 station.
Is it all that much of a leap from 50+ years to 250 years?
The Trend Has Left The Station
We all know how this goes. Once a trend passes 50 years, certain laws of physics and human nature kick in. Trends become tradition. Nobody’s left who remembers why we do it this way, but we keep doing it because that’s the way we’ve done it. Things in motion stay in motion, and more importantly, things at rest stay at rest. Let sleeping scales lie.
And despite everything listed above, without being all that absurd I can make a case for that 250-year trend.
After all, you know, basic mathematics is basic mathematics and reading is reading. There may be a new science shaping the ways that we teach them, but there’s still a need for numeracy and literacy.
Kids still need to understand and feel comfortable with numbers, to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide simple numbers fluently.
The case for reading might be even stronger, as some of the classical, great books, curricula being proposed today don’t look all that different than the works that were being discussed at the finest institutions of learning in the late 1700s. Go figure.
So, keep that NAEP trend intact through 2026, 2050, 2070, 2090, …, all the way to the nation’s quincentennial in 2276!
Maintain the trend!
To understand where we are, we need to know where we started and how far we’ve come.
If you want to measure change, don’t change the measure.
Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Stop The Train I Want To Get Off
We have heard ad nauseam that it’s critical that we maintain the NAEP trend. The trend maintainers have made appeals to emotion, set up dilemmas, introduced a red herring or two, and warned of slippery slopes, with some of their arguments holding more water than others. Yes, the NAEP trend line helped reveal and validate the Mississippi “Miracle” or “Marathon” (your choice). No, the trend isn’t the single piece of thread holding the entire NAEP enterprise together.
Nevertheless, …
It’s time to put a stop to the madness. We need to break the NAEP trend.
In this post, I’ve attempted to use reductio ad absurdum to argue that the NAEP trend, or any trend for that matter, simply cannot go on forever. Frankly, my first choice was to go right to an ad hominem attack, but all of the key people involved in NAEP and the trend argument are just too damn nice, smart, and/or competent.
I could have made a technical argument that we simply cannot maintain a scale or trend line for 35 or 50+ years. Even accepting the validity of each of the individual links in the equating chain and the soundness of the many NAEP bridgesthat have been constructed over the years, at some point well before 35 years we inevitably arrive at the classic Ship of Theseus moment where we have to acknowledge that with a NAEP test that has undergone so many transformations we cannot claim that the results are on the same scale.
In this case, however, the technical concerns about the scale are the least important of our concerns.
As I have argued for years, we don’t need to a common scale to maintain achievement standards, and we don’t need to maintain achievement standards to identify and understand trends. What we really need to interpret trends is not scale scores, but rich, content-based, descriptive information about what students know and are able to do at certain points in time.
Then we need to use that information to ask and answer the right questions to guide policy decisions, inform instruction, and/or help us monitor educational progress, remembering that progress is, by definition, goal-oriented and is not the same as growth which is not the same as simple change in numbers on a scale.
What does all of that mean with regard to maintaining or letting go of the NAEP trend?
Here’s the bottom line. If we accept that a trend cannot go on forever, then it’s more than OK, it’s essential, that we talk about when and how to end it. End it in a way that is proactive rather than reactive, a way that preserves the information that we need and lets go of the rest.
We have approached previous key transition points in NAEP history asking whether we can maintain the NAEP trend – and hoping for a positive answer. This year let’s start by asking whether we should maintain the trend, and if so, for what purpose.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 