Ideology, Rather Than Science, Continues to Control NAEP

In the important Substack commentary linked below, Paul Thomas offers an update on the 40 year-old battle to return NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) testing to the status of a useful and scientifically-grounded assessment tool, rather than the high-stakes political bludgeon created by Chester Finn and his band of renegade right-wingers (including Diane Ravitch) to pummel public schools in the U.S. for failure to reach out-of-reach proficiency levels that were instituted to regularly demonstrate the failure of public education. 

In a 2008 article in The School Administrator, Gerald Bracey provided this snapshot history of the unresolved controversy: 

The [NAEP] governing board hired a team of three well-known evaluators and psychometricians to evaluate the process — Daniel Stufflebeam of Western Michigan University, Richard Jaeger of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Michael Scriven of NOVA Southeastern University. The team delivered its final report on Aug. 23, 1991. This process does not work, the team averred, saying: "[T]he technical difficulties are extremely serious … these standards and the results obtained from them should under no circumstances be used as a baseline or benchmark … the procedures used in the exercise should under no circumstances be used as a model.” 

NAGB, led by Chester E. Finn Jr., summarily fired the team, or at least tried to. Because the researchers already had delivered the final report, the contract required payment. 

The inappropriate use of these levels continues today. The achievement levels have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing and the Brookings Institution, as well as by individual psychometricians. 

 I have repeatedly observed that the NAEP results do not mesh with those from international comparisons. In the 1995 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, assessment, American 4th graders finished third among 26 participating nations in science, but the NAEP science results from the same year stated that only 31 percent of them were proficient or better. 

 As you will see from the piece below, little has changed in the ongoing war except that minority rule by fascist bastards has become more intense.

NAEP 2026: The Politics of Testing by Paul Thomas

"Despite the best of intentions, however, in practice, reading assessments sometimes negatively impact students and their learning opportunities." Forzani, et al. (2022)

Read on Substack