Testing, Testing

I wasn’t planning to write about the recent release of NAEP scores for 12^th grade reading and math. NAEP, for the uninitiated, stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the perennial story is that there hasn’t been any progress. That’s important, but it’s become a “dog bites man” story, and I feel I’ve said pretty much all I have to say about it. For those who haven’t read what I’ve said previously, here’s a footnote summarizing my take (and that of some others), on standardized reading comprehension tests.1

Still, it’s worth mentioning that this time around, 12^th grade scores hit historic lows, with about a third of students scoring below Basic in reading and 45 percent scoring below that level in math. What does that mean? We don’t really know.

NAEP guidelines say that 12^th graders at the Basic reading level “likely can locate and identify relevant details in the text in order to support literal comprehension.” In math, they “likely can determine probabilities of simple events from 2-way tables and verbal descriptions.” So we can infer that students who score below that level are unable to do those things. But they might also struggle just to decipher the words in the test passages or to multiply numbers.2

The common wisdom is that the explanation is the pandemic, but a few astute observers have pointed out that scores were declining and gaps were widening before the pandemic. Those observers include Eric Hanushek, Marty West, and Chad Aldeman—and, in the mainstream media, Jessica Grose of the New York Times. Grose quotes a NAEP insider, Lesley Muldoon, as saying that the steady decline in reading and math started in 2013.

That’s an important point because it indicates that the root causes of our lack of progress go deeper than the disruptive effects of Covid. There’s some uncertainty about what those root causes are, but most commentators are settling on “phones” (as a shorthand for smartphones, social media, and screens generally) and too little test-based accountability.

My take is that these commentators are right about the effects of phones—although maybe not, as most assume, because they lead to declining attention spans. Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has argued in Education Next that the real problem may not be that kids can’t pay attention; it’s that