It must be hard being the NAEP Long Term Trend Assessment (LTT).
The “Main NAEP” national and state-level results are released with fanfare, live streams, and DC press conferences. Some have described the roughly biennial release as state assessment’s Super Bowl ™. But there are no fanfares, flourishes, ruffles or even drumrolls for you, LTT. No, your sporadically released results get little more than a rim shot and a LinkedIn post by Lesley Muldoon.
LTT, I bet that it’s people calling that other assessment with state-level results the “Main NAEP” that hurts most of all. After all, created by an act of Congress, for two decades you were the one and only NAEP, the only game in town, the OG national assessment, as the kids say.
Never one to rest on your laurels or take your position and responsibility for granted, you kept up with the times. In the 1980s, you gave yourself a major makeover by adopting IRT and scaled scores, including more students with disabilities, and sampling at grade- as well as age-levels. And through a series of “bridge studies” you were able to maintain a link to your original roots.
Then a few short years later along came NAGB – the National Assessment Governing Board – a group that Checker Finn dubbed a “Noah’s Ark of individuals”; and they introduced a new NAEP test, one that would report results at the state level.
So then in the 1990s “State NAEP” was administered, first on a trial basis. It hijacked your new IRT reporting scale even though its results were on a different scale – a practice long considered a no-no and PR disaster in the assessment world. It replaced your clever, clear, and easy-to-interpret scale anchoring approach to reporting with fundamentally flawed achievement levels. Achievement levels that set such a high bar for Proficient at each of its tested grades that only Massachusetts and a handful of repentant mostly Southern states equated proficiency on NAEP with students performing on grade level.
Then with NCLB came the final indignity: State NAEP would be called the “Main NAEP” with reading and mathematics tests administered every two years, and you forevermore would be known as the NAEP Long Term Trend test.
We are a quarter century further down the road now. State NAEP is firmly entrenched as the Main NAEP. You play second fiddle.
It’s high time, however, to give you your due. It’s time to take a moment to recognize the battles you fought to get NAEP up and running in the late 1960s, established in the 1970s, and refreshed and ready to go when it was discovered we were a nation at risk in the mid-1980s.
To do that, I offer just a few of the things that were written and said about you back in those days, some barbs as well as some bouquets.
Withstanding Controversy From The Start
School Administrators Nix Carnegie Project (1/13/1967)
The Executive Committee of the American Association of School Administrators today advised its membership, which includes most of the school superintendents of the country, to refuse to participate in the Carnegie Corporation’s project on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
The committee’s unanimous recommendation covers both the NAEP “tryout” tests scheduled for this winter and spring, and the eventual testing program slated to start in the fall.
[commenting on plans for reporting only at the regional level]
“Regardless of whether this geographic area is a state or a region, every school in an area which ranks below the national average would find itself branded by low performance of sampling in that area. No board of education or school staff in an area with an inferior school image would be able to withstand the heat which would be put on by power structures, legislatures and parents.” [Aside: Would that it were so.]
“No public institution in the world is assessed more frequently and critically than American education.” “Through testing instruments of various types nearly every local school system regularly gathers objective data on the performance of its students.”
Yardstick for Evaluating Schools Sought (Patriot Ledger, 2/8/73)
NAEP is only just emerging from a period of “staggering” associated with early indecision about the directions it should take.
The whole NAEP approach in fact seems to be one of treading superlightly in the controversial area of assessment.
Local school officials often fear that national assessment is part of some kind of murky plot to create a federally-dictated curriculum, which ranks somewhere just above a return to the Ice Age on their list of unthinkable eventualities.
Teachers are leery about any kind of assessment, since it is often linked with “accountability” – the idea that teachers’ performance should be rated on a tangible but simplistic scale more or less akin to a batting average.
But there were voices supporting NAEP. In an open letter in February 1967, Jame E Allen, New York chief state school officer, described the position of the American Association of School Administrators, as “an ostrich-like attitude that ignores the realities of our times.” He argued,
The demand for a more accurate means of judging the performance and assessing the needs of the states’ educational systems will not decrease. “On the contrary, it will continue to grow, with the public and legislative forces, both state and federal, insisting upon more accurate knowledge as a basis for continuing support.
Others described the need for and difficulty in determining school effectiveness. From that same Patriot Ledger article cited above:
It is easy to tell whether or not the money you paid for your new car was well spent – either the car runs well or it doesn’t. It is easy to tell whether or not the money you paid for pork chops was well spent – either they tasted good or they didn’t. It is not so easy to tell whether or not the money you are paying to educate America’s children is well spent – nobody is quite sure just what it is we expect our schools to accomplish, let alone being sure of how well they’re doing.
And a personal favorite of mine
It’s easy to tell how well a learn-to-swim program is going.” said Paul G. Campbell, director of the Educational Testing Service’s center for statewide educational assessment. “You have a kid who’s in the program jump in a pool and you’ll know if it fails because he’ll start to drown. That’s the kind of measuring device we need in the rest of our educational system.”
Finding An Identity
As shown above, in the 1960s some referred to NAEP as a Carnegie Corporation project, but over the years it has also garnered other descriptions
- NAEP is a national test or national assessment (multiple sources)
- NAEP is a nation-wide research project sponsored by the Education Commission of the States – a group of 43 states and territories. The goal is to collect census-like data about the kinds of information people have acquired. (North Hills News Record, 11/11/70)
- The NAEP is an on-going, nation-wide survey funded by the National Institute of Education, the research branch of the Department of Education. (Muncie Evening Press, 5/22/1984)
Assessment, test, survey, research project? All of the Above.
Minding The Gaps
NAEP Assesses Male, Female Brain Power (UPI, Jacksonville Journal, 9/11/71)
Based on a survey that drew on 80,000 young Americans we at least know a little more about the brainpower, based on sex, in the fields of science and writing.
- “Males perform better than females [in science] but they aren’t in the same league when it comes to knowledge of the human reproduction and birth aspects of biological science.” NAEP reported.
- “The females in the test groups were much better than males at writing cheery messages or social notes.”
Blacks, Hispanics make dramatic strides in SAT scores (The Herald-Times Bloomington, IN, May, 1984)
[While commenting on improvements in SAT Scores, ETS president Gregory Anrig also noted the following.]
results of NAEP reading exercises … show that black-white differences have been cut in half – from an average 20 percent gap between black and white scores for those born in 1953 to an average difference of 10 percent for those born in 1970. There are similar positive trends in NAEP mathematics assessments and in scores on the SAT and Graduate Record Examinations.” “The improvement in black students’ test scores is occurring nationwide, with the best gains in the Southeast, where school desegregation has had its greatest impact.
And an early statement regarding NAEP results statement that would be repeated often and remain largely true for decades across the LTT and Main NAEP.
The results and analysis published thus far – in five of the 10 subject areas – have supplied no great surprises. Those who have done worst on the tests are people who are black, whose parents have the least education, who live in the Southeast, who live in the inner city. But the NAEP officials stress that the value of their project lies in something more than reconfirming educational truisms.
Clarity of Purpose
As the statement below and some of those listed above show, from the beginning, there was an evaluative and accountability aspect to NAEP. A 1989 C-span program even referred to NAEP as the National Assessment of Educational Programs. (Actually, that kinda works for me.)
Like other testing associated with Title 1 and the original ESEA, there was a sense of ensuring that federal money was being well spent.
“Every year billions of dollars are spent on education in the United States, but very little is known about the effectiveness of this expense,” the institute points out. “NAEP gives educators, policymakers and parents an idea of what they are getting for their money.”
Within that sentiment also was the need to be honest and straightforward with parents about student performance. From the James E Allen letter:
“Probably the decision [to test] will be made by parents and citizens, who should, considering what the schools are costing these days, insist that their schools “stand up and be tested.”
But for the final word on the purpose of NAEP, I’ll turn to Archie Lapointe, employed at ETS, described as the executive director of The Nation’s Report Card, and the person whom I saw as the face of NAEP as I was beginning my career. These words were written in 1984 in reference to the revised NAEP tests described in my opening paragraphs. I think, however, that they could just as easily be written today when discussing NAEP and its future.
Parents of American school children can’t help but be concerned. Studies and reports recently issued on the condition of the nation’s school are dreary and conflicting. Most speak in terms of national trends, providing little relevance to local communities. That situation is about to change.
The new NAEP is not trying to reform or revolutionize education. Rather, it is committed to providing parents with solid information about the skills and abilities their children should develop as they mature into adult members of our society. This information will also be useful to decision makers charged with the management and improvement of education. Ultimately, the goal of NAEP is impact on interactions between two human beings – a teacher and a pupil.
Image by freestocks-photos from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 