Tough search for causes of falling NAEP scores

On Wednesday, the 2015 NAEP test scores, often known as the Nation’s Report Card, revealed national declines for the first time since the tests began in 1990.

Math scores dropped in 4^th and 8^th grades; reading scores dropped for eighth grade students, but were flat for fourth graders.  While there were a few bright spots in the district and state specific results, there were many more dark ones.  The declines are also evident across race groups, which takes away one previous source of comfort for analysts, including myself. Don’t let anyone sugarcoat it: whether these scores are a blip, a plateau or a decline, they are real cause for concern.

Unfortunately, there is no clear cause of the national declines, but most experts want to find causes in national education policies. Expect a flurry of claims that these results finally show the folly of standards based accountability, so either No Child Left Behind or the Common Core. However, such claims are no more justified than Arne Duncan’s use of prior NAEP gains to show those policies’ virtue. Most of the misuse of NAEP evidence is simply confirmation bias.

The real folly is to draw a straight line between these results and any single education policy.

In fact, policy governing public schools may not be the culprit at all. If it were, then we would not expect to see similar declines in NAEP scores in private schools.  The NAEP data release does not present separate scores for private schools, but it does have estimates for all schools (public and private together) and for public schools. The estimated decreases were larger for the combined public and private schools than for all public schools on 8^th grade math and 4^th and 8^th grade reading.

Even though these estimates can’t yet be tested for significance, they suggest that the declines in private schools’ scores were at least consistent with, if not larger than, the declines in public schools’ scores. This makes it very difficult to attribute the NAEP declines to public policy in general, much less to specific policies.

“Wait and see” is the last piece of advice we want to hear when confronted with troubling news like this NAEP release. However, until the dust settles and careful analyses can provide plausible reasons for these declines, patience is the most prudent and productive course.

 

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