Worried About Helping Students “Catch Up”? Here’s How To Do It.
You've been seeing plenty of headlines about the dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.
Despite the panic, the NAEP results have provided no clear answers about any of the things people want answers about. As we saw with the "little" NAEP results, there's no clear connection between school closings and dropped scores— staying open when other schools were closed did not produce any clear advantages. And in fact some score declines mirrored other pre-pandemic declines.
Add this on top of the usual caveats about the test. NAEP’s “proficient” is set considerably higher than grade level, as noted on the NAEP site. (This is a lesson that has to be relearned as often as NAEP scores are released.) Students who don’t achieve “proficient” are not “below grade level.” And when interpreting scores, NAEP is extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else. There are too many factors in play to point to any single factor as a clear cause.
But with all that said, folks are settling on the new scores as confirmation that U.S. students fell behind the levels they would have achieved had the pandemic not occurred. There is always danger in comparing real students in this world to imaginary students in some imaginary parallel universe, but we’ve been through a couple of years now ringing alarms on Learning Loss and a wide variety of solutions that folks would like to sell, and now many folks are worried about “recovery.”