What Does a Test Say About Your Child? There’s More Than Meets the Eye

Elementary and secondary schools are approaching the middle of the first semester. Do you know how your child is doing?

The answer is not as simple as it sounds.

State and federal lawmakers can help parents and schools by approving new methods for educators to measure students and by maintaining the Nation’s Report Card, a test that offers valuable comparisons with student results on state assessments.

Parents rely on student grades and report cards to track progress. And every state is required to test students in reading and math annually in grades three through eight. State officials reliably publish graduation rates for each class every year. Then there are college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT, still more ways for parents and students to gauge achievement.

Yet not all these indicators agree with each other. For example, reading and math scores on the Nation’s Report Card (or the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as NAEP) have been dismal for a decade or more as the average graduation rate in the U.S. is 87%.

How could students perform poorly in key subjects and yet schools graduate nearly nine out of 10 students unless one of these measures is unreliable?

State test results, meanwhile, often reveal that students are more likely to score proficient on their state test than on the Nation’s Report Card. In fact, FutureEd researchers found that the gap between students scoring proficient on their state test and their state’s NAEP proficiency rates was at least 15 percentage points in three out of four U.S. states.

These proficiency rates mean students look better on state tests than on the longstanding national comparison. Some researchers call this the “honesty gap” and calculate the difference between state proficiency rates and proficiency rates on NAEP.

Maryland’s honesty gap is 15 percentage points in reading, according to the Collaborative for Student Success. This means that in Maryland, the share of students who can read at grade level is 15 percentage points higher than the share of students rated proficient on NAEP.

In some states, the honesty gap is large (in Wisconsin, the gap is 21 percentage points in reading and 14 percentage points in math) while it is smaller in others (in Louisiana, nine points in reading and two points in math).

Researchers, policymakers, and families can conclude from these analyses that parents need more than one indicator of achievement. And while the National Assessment of Educational Progress does not measure the progress of the same students moving from one year to the next, there is a long-term trend assessment that allows researchers to track average performance among U.S. students over time. These results are valuable for state policymakers reviewing academic areas that need attention and families comparing student success in different areas of the country.

In general, U.S. Department of Education policies have not improved student achievement nationally, nor has the agency made schools more efficient. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a valuable program, however, because it allows for “honesty” comparisons with state test results and long-term measures of achievement.

Heritage Foundation research recommends that education officials move the Institute of Education Sciences and its retained functions to another agency such as the U.S. Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics. These offices track other federal datasets and could manage NAEP reporting even as the Education Department downsizes.

Meanwhile, state officials should welcome new entrants to the market for college admissions tests, such as the Classic Learning Test (CLT). The SAT and ACT have dominated this area for years, but lately, researchers have questioned the College Board’s changes to the digital SAT. Reading passages are shorter and the computer-adapted test is not as rigorous as it once was.

The Classic Learning Test uses passages from classic works of literature and philosophy for the reading comprehension sections and focuses on logic and reasoning in the math portions. Such attention to detail and difficulty are welcome.

For parents who are concerned that educators “over-test” students, families and teachers should decide together on the most effective ways to evaluate students. Policymakers should keep NAEP, though, because it serves as a useful comparison to state assessments. Testing companies, meanwhile, should concentrate on creating accurate measurements and offering parents clear ways to track student progress.

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