National Assessement of Educational Progress: not much progress under NCLB

The National Assessement of Educational Progress long-term trend data was released yesterday, and the news is not good for how things have been heading since NCLB.

In sum: we were doing better before it.

While math and reading scores have improved for 9 and 13 year olds, the improvement has significantly slowed. Also troubling is the lack of movement in the achievement gap between minority and white students:

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

You can find more at:
USA Today , The Christian Science Monitor , and U.S. News and World Report's (4/29) On Education blog