It's NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) test score reporting week, and as always, we have hand-wringing for a few days and then ... little more.
Whenever we talk about test scores, I want to begin with a litany of disclaimers about the very limited information that we get from these tests. Diane Ravitch, once a vocal proponent of "accountability" via standardized tests, nicely summarizes what is especially problematic about the NAEP.
That said, to the extent that we can learn things from these tests, I offer this quote about persistent achievement gaps on the NAEP between kids in high-income schools and kids in low-income schools, from a member of the governing board of the NAEP:
“The rich get richer and the poor are getting shafted,” said Scott Marion, who serves on the NAEP’s governing board and is the executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit consultancy. “It’s almost criminal.”
These gaps grew this year. We know that children in high-poverty schools were harmed far more by the massive disruptions of COVID than were students in other schools, in part because their lives were also more disrupted by family job loss, family illness, and loss of already scarce community resources. We know that the funds sent to schools to attempt to support recovery from COVID learning loss helped to fund teachers' aides or after school tutoring, but didn't come close to meeting children's needs in the short time that the funds were available, especially in cash-strapped districts with many competing needs for those funds.
But as one of my former mentors would argue, we keep acting as if the best way to grow bigger chickens is to weigh the chickens more often.
It would be great for colleges to teach more about the "almost criminal" "shafting" of kids in low-income schools as part of talking about the "resilience" of "first-gen" students that goes beyond euphemisms that mask inequalities. It would be great to teach college students more about how policy sustains inequalities, and for journalists to do more than handwringing stories about the NAEP scores every year with so little on the "why".
But teaching more about the persistent "almost criminal" inequalities in schooling would challenge core myths of meritocracy. It would be much harder to keep pretending that everyone in college is the same, happily drawn together by their own talent and hard work.
