Assessing the school assessment
The Oklahoma students who took the 2007 National Assessment of Education Progress exams are likely proud of the test results that were released Tuesday.
The scores show that Oklahoma was only one of 14 states whose students made gains in both grade 4 and grade 8 math since the 2005 assessment. Grade 4 reading scores also went up; grade 8 reading scores remained unchanged.
Nationwide, scores rose for both grades in both subjects. However, actual state scores are below the national averages.
About 2,800 Oklahomans took the four NAEP exams — about 40 percent were minority and more than 50 percent qualified for free or reduced lunch, a poverty indicator.
But scholars at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, a nonprofit policy research foundation in Washington, caution that the students’ gains may not be worth much celebration.
“While scores did generally improve, today’s NAEP results are nothing to write home about, nor are they any indicator that No Child Left Behind is doing any good,” said Cato policy analyst Neal McCluskey.
“Score improvements were small and either only continued increases taking place before NCLB, or actually slowed or stopped overall improvement rates,” he said.
Check out http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard for more details on the test results.
Wendy K. Kleinman
Education Writer
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