I recall each time a report card came home when I was a kid. I was worried it wouldn’t be as good as my parents would hope. And even though authority figures told me the report card was there to help give me information on how I could improve, feedback wasn’t really something I was looking forward to. Now I see this happen for my kids, though I’m now the parent and care deeply about this kind of information to ensure my kids are learning and developing as much as they can. Without information on how they are doing relative to their classmates, or kids in the state, or across the nation, or even the world, it’s tough to know where they stand.
The U.S. itself has a report card, and it’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). And it turns out Chester E. Finn, Jr., distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has been involved in developing and reading the nation’s report cards for over the last half century. He collects his thoughts in a new book Assessing the nation’s report card: Challenges and choices for NAEP.
In the following interview, Chester explains the history and development of NAEP, whether cooperative work across political parties regarding education reform is still possible, and explains his views on the role of testing in American education. In many ways, the book is also the story of U.S. education policy, seen through the lens of NAEP and its history.
You speak of NAEP throughout your book as passing developmental milestones the way a person might. Can you explain why you made this choice and how it provides insight to your thinking about NAEP?
Chester Finn
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka “the nation’s report card,” is nearing its 60th birthday, including more than five decades of actually administering tests to U.S. students. That’s a long saga and, not surprisingly, the program has evolved and changed in dozens of ways over that period. Major overhauls occurred in the 1970’s, twice in the 1980’s, again in the early ‘90’s, big time when NCLB was enacted in 2002, and on several occasions since. Big changes are again underway today.
The history of NAEP, therefore, which is the first half of my book, is more like a movie or Ken Burns documentary than a photograph. Some changes took place in response to evolutions in testing methodology (a realm in which NAEP itself made major contributions to the large-scale assessment of student learning), some in response to emerging technologies, but most came about as a result of shifting—and growing—demands by U.S. policy leaders and educators for more and better data on the achievement of our K-12 pupils and the performance of our schools and education systems. Important changes have also occurred in how NAEP operates and is governed.
I’ve had the opportunity to participate in some of those changes and to observe and comment on others. I think I can take some credit for helping to instigate a few of them, such as the Governing Board’s development (and defense) of the three NAEP “achievement levels” that are the closest thing American education has ever come to aspirational national standards for student learning.
That NAEP has been able to adapt has been key not only to its survival but, far more importantly, to the contributions it has made to U.S. education over these many years. Before NAEP, we had no real gauge of student achievement. Until NAEP began testing at the state level, we had no real ability for governors to compare the achievement of their schools to that of the country or other states (and sometimes other countries). Before NAEP expanded beyond reading and math into what are now ten subjects, we knew next to nothing about whether young Americans have any understanding of science, history, geography and more. Before NAEP admitted big urban districts (now 27 of them) into its sample, Cleveland had no way of knowing how its school performance compares to that of Austin or Chicago or Atlanta.
I could go on. I could also list compelling reasons why NAEP both needs to adapt and mustn’t change too much too fast, because perhaps its single greatest value is tracking student achievement over time. Change the tests too drastically and those “trend lines” collapse.
Based on your experience in U.S. education policy and working on NAEP, what is your sense that cooperative work across political parties is something that can still be aspired to?
Assessing the nation’s report card
We’re not at a great moment for “cooperative work across parties,” thanks to today’s schismatic politics, culture wars, and “gotcha” mentality. But it’s not impossible. As I write this, Congress has been agreeing to a handful of worthy bipartisan measures. And my own work in education, including but not limited to NAEP-related work, has included periods (and moments) of successful bipartisanship, such as when I worked for the late Senator Pat Moynihan [D-NY] in the late ‘70’s and then a decade later when I worked (on behalf of the Reagan administration) on a major NAEP overhaul with the late Senator Ted Kennedy [D-MA] and his excellent staff. Part of what emerged from that overhaul was the new National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which I had the honor of chairing during its first couple of years. Over the years, that board has done well at subordinating the political differences and organizational interests of its 26 members to a collegial, consensus-style approach to what’s good for American education.
I’ve also had the opportunity at several stages to work with former Senator (and governor and Education Secretary) Lamar Alexander [R-TN], who prided himself on “getting things done” in Congress including such impressive across-the-aisle achievements as 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
That said, we’re not at a great moment for cooperative policy-making in K-12 education, either in Washington or in many state capitols. The “culture wars” have arrived in education along with highly partisan politics and too many of our leaders find getting elected or re-elected far more important than accomplishing anything.
As I show in the book, NAGB itself has come close in recent years to succumbing to disputation rather than consensus, particularly when it comes to the delicate work of deciding what should be on those NAEP tests. The Board’s new “framework” for reading assessments carries the scars of very different views of reading itself, as well as sundry equity issues. NAGB has recently embarked on the development of a new framework for science—how will it handle climate change?—and the volatile subjects of history and civics lie ahead.
The core issue here is that NAEP’s authority and credibility depend in great measure on its ability to create and embody consensus regarding what American K-12 students should know and be able to do. Only then can it successfully function as “the nation’s report card.” Particularly considering that it’s administered and paid for by the big, bad federal government, NAEP’s value to the country hinges on the assessment’s capacity to rise above—or bridge—the divisions that beset us.
How does your study of NAEP shed light on the role of testing in U.S. education, from the past to the present?
Practically nobody loves testing, yet we use and depend on it in so many ways—and not just in education. Imagine a society without drivers license tests, without FDA tests of food purity and drug safety, without tests of would-be airplane pilots, without tests of new weapons as well as new ways of detecting and measuring pollution.
In K-12 education, we use tests to see whether kids have learned what they should have, whether schools are effective, whether gaps between student groups are narrowing or widening, whether Kathy or Juanita should get college credit for courses taken in high school, whether their younger siblings are ready to succeed in kindergarten, whether Mississippi is catching up with Massachusetts, and so much more.
I often refer to NAEP as “the most important test that you’ve probably never heard of.” It’s our most trusted and accurate barometer of student achievement across the country, from state to state, from group to group, and over time. But you likely know little about it because, as a “low stakes” sample-based assessment, it has no immediate impact on your own child, your own school, even (with a few exceptions) your local school system. The data it yields are of greatest value to policymakers, state and national leaders in education and government, journalists and researchers. They make little difference to “the man on the street.” That’s why NAEP sometimes has to struggle to persuade schools to lend a hundred or so pupils for a couple of hours to participate in the next round of assessments.
Yet being low-stakes has big advantages, too. It keeps NAEP out of most of the controversies and political cross-fire that typically beset “test-based accountability.” It avoids “being taught to.” It cannot reasonably be accused of disrupting curriculum or teachers’ preferred pedagogies. It doesn’t upset parents or risk getting the principal fired. And along the way NAEP has been a pioneer of large-scale, sample-style assessments that has greatly influenced state testing, commercial testing, psychometrics itself—and international assessments such as PISA. Today NAEP is grappling with the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to more sophisticated technology while also preserving the “trend lines” that are among its most valuable assets.
Education tests that cannot compare the present to the past cannot tell us whether achievement is getting better or worse, whether gaps are narrowing or widening, the extent to which we’re still a “nation at risk,” the severity of Covid learning losses, and so forth. For this and more we look to NAEP. It can’t answer “why” questions, and many find that deeply frustrating, but it’s better than anything else at telling the truth about student achievement in the United States.
