NAEP scores drop!!!!
Duh. There was a pandemic.
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Again with the NAEP test scores.
The media hysteria over the news that students at 4th and 8th grade saw their math and reading scores drop should not have been shocking.
Teachers have already told us that the pandemic presented serious challenges to teaching and learning.
I know that’s what they told me.
NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is sometimes referred to as “the nation’s report card” because some believe it is a consistent measure of U.S. student achievement. It is administered every two years to groups of U.S. students in the fourth and eighth grades, and less frequently to high school students.
But in the end it is a test and what any single testing assessment tells us is very limited.
Perhaps a snapshot. Not much more.
The idea of “learning loss” is totally suspect. Did 8th graders really lose two years of learning?
Nope.
Learning can’t be measured in years or even grade levels.
Plus, the NAEP doesn’t even claim it can.
The Right’s finger pointing at teacher unions falls flat when faced with the fact that the NAEP itself shows a decline in scores in districts and states across the country where there are teacher unions or not. Masking or not. Remote instruction or not.
Forward thinking progressive educators, parents and policy makers are using the experiences of the pandemic to rethink old ideas about teaching and learning including rejecting the over-reliance on tests.
Reactionaries, on the other hand, will do what they do.