Education Sector Press Releases

For Immediate Release: October 23, 2007
Contact: Renée Rybak, 202.552.2853

Washington, D.C.— When the U.S. Department of Education and the National Assessment Governing Board released the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress last month, government officials, interest groups, pundits, and policymakers seized on the new NAEP results to attack or defend a wide range of education policies. President Bush remarked the results were "outstanding," and that they "confirm No Child Left Behind is working," while others are divided on what to make of the results, particularly as Congress prepares to reauthorize NCLB.

But the limitations of what NAEP can tell us are often lost amid various politically motivated claims and counter-claims. NAEP is a vital tool for measuring student achievement in America. It is the most reliable source of long-term national trends and the best way to compare the educational performance of different states and groups of students. But the challenges inherent in accurately assessing a wide range of subjects, students, and localities make NAEP one of the most complex tests in existence. Such complexity has led to misinterpretation and oversimplification of NAEP results by the media, partisans in education debates, and others.

NAEP is also not without controversy, with critics pointing to the exclusion of students with disabilities and limited English proficiency, as well as the use of widely reported but inherently subjective "achievement levels" like "Basic," "Proficient," and "Advanced."

"Understanding NAEP", a new Education Sector Explainer, is a guide to deciphering NAEP and all its complexities. It describes NAEP's decades-long history and expanding role in the NCLB era, detailing how the assessment is designed, how its scores are calculated and what they mean, and what controversies surround the reporting and use of NAEP data. It seeks to set straight what conclusions can and cannot be legitimately drawn from the NAEP assessment and examines what challenges lay ahead for the "Nation's Report Card" in an era of increased accountability.

Read "Understanding NAEP: Inside the Nation's Education Report Card".

Also read other Education Sector Explainers including: "What It Means to Make 'Adequate Yearly Progress' Under NCLB" and "Making the Cut: How States Set Passing Scores."

Education Sector is an independent education policy think tank devoted to developing innovative solutions to the nation’s most pressing educational problems. We are nonprofit and nonpartisan, both a dependable source of sound thinking on policy and an honest broker of evidence in key education debates throughout the United States.