The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in key subject areas — began in 1964 with a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to set up the Exploratory Committee for the Assessment of Progress in Education. Since then, the Corporation has supported the creation of the Education Commission of the States, which operated NAEP for its first fifteen years; the evaluation, overhaul, and modernization of NAEP in the 1970s and 1980s; a number of NAEP-informed studies, scholars, analyses, and reports; and most recently the publication of Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP by Chester E. Finn Jr. (Harvard Education Press, 2022), which outlines plans for improving and modernizing the assessment. The following article is an edited excerpt from the book.
America’s most important testing program is one that most people have never heard of. It’s not the SAT, the ACT, Advanced Placement, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the annual state assessments required by federal law, much less the contentious entry tests employed by selective high schools such as Stuyvesant and Boston Latin.
Nope. Those are all widely used, hotly debated, and much in the news of late, but they’re far from most important. Topping the list of what really matters is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka “the Nation’s Report Card” and widely referred to simply as “NAEP.”
Most of the time, it doesn’t make much news. It’s relatively low key — remarkable for any test at a time when testing has grown so contentious — and it rarely elicits strong feelings. Which means it doesn’t have many enemies, nor many cheerleaders either. Perhaps because it’s been around for more than half a century, those who are even aware of it tend to take it for granted, part of the education furniture that was already in the room long before they entered. Most people, however, are scarcely conscious of it.
The main reason, I think, is that NAEP has no immediate impact on most Americans. It tells them nothing about their own child, their own school, or (with a handful of exceptions) their own community. From the standpoint of a parent or grandparent, local taxpayer, teacher, or principal, it’s just not very relevant.
Yet the National Assessment of Educational Progress is, and for decades has been, America’s premier gauge of whether its children — all our children — are learning anything in school, whether they’re learning any more today than years ago, and whether the learning gaps among groups of children are narrowing or widening. Moreover, it supplies that information not just at the end of high school, not just among college-bound students, not just among fifteen-year-olds, and not just for the entire country. Nor does it confine itself to reading and math. Rather, it reports on student achievement in grades 4, 8, and 12. It reports on that achievement in as many as ten different subjects. And it does so (at least some of the time for some of those subjects in some of those grades) not only for the nation as a whole but also for every state and for several dozen big-city school systems, as well as some private schools.
Also important: NAEP is far more than a simple barometer gauging changes in education performance. It also enables users to determine how well what their state expects of its fourth graders, say, in math, or eighth graders in English, stacks up against a widely accepted version of national standards for those subjects. Because it makes accommodations for children with special needs while requiring schools to include most such children in the tested population, it both supplies accurate information on how they’re faring academically and sets a good example for states’ own assessment regimes. Because it employs a variety of test questions, not just the multiple-choice kind, it provides sophisticated information about how well young Americans can perform important advanced assignments such as writing coherent sentences and paragraphs that explain things and cite evidence.
Besides all that, NAEP subtly causes education in the United States to improve by providing educators with feedback on what groups of their pupils can and cannot do in the subjects that matter most, and it provides this in ways that illustrate how many are good (or not) at various elements of those subjects.
This poorly understood and inadequately appreciated federal program is a precious resource for all who worry about the country’s future. No matter whether your foremost concern is international economic competitiveness or domestic equity, the excellence of our workforce or the upward mobility of children born into poverty and discrimination, the performance of our education system or the return on taxpayer dollars, you won’t get the information you need without NAEP. Yet NAEP’s capacity to deliver that information depends on you and those you place in leadership roles, not only in Washington but also in the statehouse and on the local school board. NAEP is part of a culture and policy regime that value accurate information about educational outcomes. If that culture and policy regime endure, America will continue to need and benefit from a robust national assessment.
Seven things to know about NAEP:
- Funded by Congress and administered by the U.S. Department of Education, NAEP reports achievement gaps within states and in almost thirty large districts, and because it reports gains, losses, and flat performance at the system level, it can reveal large differences between NAEP’s definition of student proficiency and the version — almost always easier — that the state is employing.
- NAEP’s achievement levels – dubbed basic, proficient, and advanced – are the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to stable national standards for student learning in the elementary and secondary years.
- Thanks to the extraordinary decentralization of American primary-secondary education, especially with respect to curriculum and pedagogy, it’s no easy matter to determine what skills and knowledge to incorporate into a nationwide assessment. Decisions about the composition of a NAEP assessment are laborious, involving wide input, judgment calls, and compromises.
- Participating students are also presented with questionnaires containing a host of background questions about themselves, their own experience with education, and what (and how) they’ve been taught in school. Their teachers and principals are also given NAEP questionnaires that request personal data, information about their training and teaching experience, commentary on the resources and functioning of their school, and considerable background on their classroom approach.
- The ways that important NAEP decisions get made are blurry and conflicted. On paper, authority is vested in — and awkwardly divided between — the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the twenty-six-member bipartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which is a Noah’s Ark of individuals chosen because of the constituencies that they represent: two governors, two state legislators, two chief state school officers, two local superintendents, an elementary principal, a secondary principal, three classroom teachers, and so forth. Neither, however, has clear-cut decision-making power and neither is an entirely free agent. Meant to be a nonpartisan and expert-led federal statistical agency with its own presidentially appointed commissioner, NCES is lodged within the Institute of Education Sciences, which has its own governance hierarchy and in turn is part of the U.S. Department of Education, which as part of the executive branch, is accountable to the president but has its laws made and funds appropriated by Congress.
- America learns quite a lot from NAEP data, the release of which often leads to revealing analyses by others. Consider, for example, the 2010 example of civics, which has been much in the spotlight these past few years. Average scores had barely budged since four years earlier, yet it remained newsworthy that fewer than one-quarter of test-takers reached NAGB’s “proficient” bar — among the worst showings of any subject in the NAEP portfolio. Analysts at the Brookings Institution were encouraged to find in the civics report evidence that the white-Hispanic score gap had narrowed over two decades, although the white-black and rich-poor gaps remained unchanged and alarmingly wide.
- NAEP is great at detecting and displaying changes in and differences between learning outcomes, but it cannot explain causation. For example, we can observe within the 2019 eighth grade NAEP reading results that both white and Hispanic students were reading worse than in 2017. And, in April 2021, NCES published a close look at the oral reading fluency of fourth graders (based on a special 2018 NAEP study, akin to one done in 2002) that helped explain why so many youngsters score at the “below basic” level in reading: a key finding indicates that they hadn’t mastered phonics and phonemic awareness sufficiently to read the test passages fluently, which limited their comprehension of those passages and reduced their scores accordingly. NAEP may help identify questions for further research, studies that may shed light on causal relationships and potentially worthy interventions. By itself, however, NAEP cannot get us to where we’d like to be in diagnosing and curing the shortcomings of American education.
Chester E. Finn Jr. is distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In the forefront of the national debate about school reform for five decades, Finn was present at NAEP’s founding and is one of its most prominent advocates.
This article is an edited excerpt from Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP by Chester E. Finn Jr. (Harvard Education Press, 2022). Reprinted with permission.
