NAEP, the Big Picture, and a Separate Part of the K-12 Equation
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is congressionally mandated.
Per the NAEP website, NAEP serves to nationally assess “what our nation’s students know and can do in subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing.” Also included are U.S. history, civics, geography, and the arts. NAEP is under the umbrella of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
As further noted in the NAEP website, NAEP assessments are administered to 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds.
The three NAEP levels are basic, proficient, and advanced.
The usefulness of NAEP for the HSe web app is as a longitudinal reference. For the HSe web app, NAEP will serve as a tool to compare NAEP results before and after the launch of the HSe web app. In addition to NAEP, HSe4Metrics will use other longitudinal sources to determine hard-number change following the HSe web app’s launch.
- Known as the Nation’s Report Card, students and school systems may look at the NAEP test as a test, but NAEP prefers to define itself as an assessment of the U.S. education system, noting that students themselves are not affected, whether their individual assessment results are high or low. Congress enacted the National Assessment Government Board (NAGB) in 1988 to oversee NAEP. Appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Education, the NAGB board members set the standards for basic, proficiency, and advanced.
- HSe will leave to others the nuances and interpretation of NAEP results, the fodder of age-old debate by informed authorities, together with education writers in the media.
- If there is a general consensus on the NAEP assessment results of the past few decades and today, it is that the results are dire.
With the HSe web app NOT launched, NOT reaching NAEP basic proficiency in 2005: 57%
On C-SPAN, June 30, 2005, the director of NAGB, Charles Smith, said that 57% of young people in the U.S. were not reaching basic proficiency, much the same since 1994.
And years later . . . less than half of 12th graders read and write "at or above proficiency rates"
Skipping ahead to 2018: Per the Center For Education Reform, see https://edreform.com/2018/04/important-implications-of-the-naep-results/, although 88% of U.S. students graduate from high school, NAEP shows that less than half of them read and write at or above proficient rates.
From the 2005 reference to the one in 2018, and until today (albeit the impact of COVID-19 is not yet known), little has changed
Although it may be argued that the percentage may have improved several points (if it can be assumed that the NAEP evaluation process has not changed), as any HSe volunteer and parent knows, roughly half of our high school graduates not reaching NAEP’s basic proficiency portends a catastrophic socio-economic hurdle for the young people within that cohort—a misfortune that may carry over to their progeny.
Stagnation: Moreover, as noted by Peter Green in a November 2, 2019, article for Forbes: “In all discussions, it’s useful to remember that increases or decreases are small—a difference of just a few points up or down. NAEP scores have shown neither a dramatic increase nor decrease, but a sort of dramatic stagnation. That is arguably worse news for education reformers, who have been promising dramatic improvements in student achievement since No Child Left Behind became law almost twenty years ago.”
The Big Picture (copied from the HSe Web App Intro)
Per the U.S. News & World Report, the world ranks the United States, in a perception-based ranking, as number one in 2021, the same as in 2020: “The Best Country in the World for Education.”
The ranking is in spite of the appalling handicap of roughly half of all U.S. high school graduates not reaching the lowest level of NAEP proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
- Windfall upside potential awaits not just the bottom half but the top half, too, subject to the HSe web app joining with the nation’s young people, and their parents and guardians.
- A primary asset of a top industrial and technological nation that wants to remain at the top is its young people; hence, the need to have all of its young people partake in the benefits of the best K-12 education system in the world.
A Separate Part of the K-12 equation (copied from the HSe Web App Intro)
Although the U.S. may arguably have the finest K-12 education system in the world, and the finest teachers on the front lines of that system, there is another part of the equation: the partnership role of students themselves, and their parents and guardians (as noted in the final video on the HSe Web App Intro page).
Beginning years before kindergarten, the HSe web app will be positioned to work with every young person from the time of infancy and continuing until the day of high school graduation. The HSe web app process will be fully independent from our nation’s highly capable, massive K-12 education machine.
The HSe web app process will ultimately accrue to benefit the hard-number metrics results of K-12 education in the U.S., proxy indicators being national NAEP assessment results as well as international testing results.