Quotes About NAEP

NAEP is central to any discussion of whether American students and the public schools they attend are doing well or badly. It has measured reading and math and other subjects over time. It is administered to samples of students; no one knows who will take it, no one can prepare to take it, no one takes the whole test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP; no student ever gets a test score.

According to the United States Department of Education (DOE), the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)11 reports that only 26 percent of the nation's twelfth graders are proficient in math and only 38 percent are proficient in reading. There is also a twenty-nine percentage point gap between the reading proficiency of white and black twelfth-grade students. And these numbers are unchanged since 2009.12

Consistent with those patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America's educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT."15