Let’s get ready to better measure success

Let’s get ready: Educating All Americans for Success is designed to help governors spur innovation to close opportunity gaps that limit economic mobility.

It starts with identifying these gaps. At the initiative’s first regional meeting in Denver, NGA Chairman Colorado Gov. Jared Polis welcomed representatives from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) to brief governors on recent trends highlighted in The Nation’s Report Card. be recorded.

“It is important to know where we stand and how to fully understand the challenges we face,” said Governor Polis.

Through assessments conducted every four years, NAEP measures the academic performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in math, reading, and other subjects.

Dr. Marty West, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP’s administration and publication, was on hand to provide an overview of NAEP’s results. The discussion was moderated by Marlon Marshall, CEO of City Fund – an organization dedicated to providing grants in twin cities to provide a quality education to all students, especially those who have historically been unable to access it.

“NAEP is the only common measure we have to compare student academic performance nationally and state by state,” said Dr. West. “It allows us to answer questions like: How do U.S. students perform academically? How does this generation of students compare to previous generations? And how much progress has different groups of students made over time? We like to say that NAEP allows us to tell the success stories of American students over time and in context.”

The next edition of NAEP will be published in early 2025, providing states with another benchmark to measure students’ progress in recovering from the learning losses observed since the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the last report card was released in 2022, the impact of learning loss from the pandemic was significant.

“We saw pretty dramatic declines in performance across all grade levels and subject areas,” Dr. West. “Not only did achievement decline, but the declines were greatest among our lowest-performing students – an indication of who bore the brunt of the learning loss associated with the pandemic.”

Although the declines are “significant, pervasive and persistent,” they are not entirely new, Dr. West firmly.

“However, I would like to remind people that the decade before the pandemic was a decade of relative stagnation or even a slight decline in students’ academic ability,” he explained. “This was a time when we were experiencing general stagnation. We saw that higher-performing students—those in the 90th percentile, those in the 75th percentile—were able to hold their own. But we saw that the performance of lower-performing students actually declined quite quickly. This increase in performance is a trend that began before the pandemic.”

The lesson? “It is a reminder of why the goal cannot just be to return to normality,” emphasized Dr. West. “The goal really has to be to move to a more effective system.”

NAEP also reveals significant deficits in civic education. “Civics and U.S. history are the subject areas in which U.S. students perform worse,” shared Dr. West with. NAEP found that only 20% of students achieved proficiency in civics – with more than three-quarters scoring at or below the basic level. For example, only a third of eighth graders could correctly identify the three branches of government and their functions. “If you ask eighth graders if they spend time studying these topics, (the answers show) they don’t,” explained Dr. West. “I don’t believe students are incapable of learning (civics). We didn’t focus on that.”

Civics is assessed nationally by NAEP and not state by state. But that’s changing, West said. From 2030, individual states will have the opportunity to take part in a separate civic assessment free of charge.

Dr. West offered governors advice on how to use NAEP effectively: “Keep expectations high. High expectations do not guarantee high levels of success, but they are a must. You can understand what’s going on in your own state and learn from states that are likely near you. You can use NAEP data to inform partnerships with universities, the business community and more.”

Governors are doing just that. During a discussion about their states’ approaches, several governors shared how they are using data and information about employment needs to drive innovation in education. Click here to view highlights from the governor’s debate in Denver and click here for an overview of the education policy priorities the governors presented in their 2024 State of the State addresses.