What’s Really Driving America’s Lackluster Standardized Test Scores?

The latest NAEP results are sparking a critique of the Common Core and the way schools deal with social factors.

Oct 28, 2015·

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

Let the fingerpointing begin.

Math scores are down for fourth graders and eighth graders—and reading scores are up slightly for fourth graders and stagnant for eighth graders. That’s the uninspiring academic picture laid out in the results of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal government-administered standardized test sometimes known as the Nation’s Report Card.

The results, released Wednesday and detailed in the video above, show the achievement of a racially and economically representative sample of students enrolled in both public and private schools across the United States. They’ve ignited a debate in education circles over what’s to blame for the lackluster performance of the nation’s schoolchildren. Standardized testing, draconian education reform policies enacted under the George W. Bush–era education law No Child Left Behind, and the maligned Common Core State Standards are taking a beating—as is the way politicians and policy makers deal with out-of-school factors such as poverty and racism.

“This isn’t a pattern that we saw coming, and in that sense, it was an unexpected downturn,” Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which analyzed the scores for the U.S. Department of Education, told U.S. News & World Report.

These are the first NAEP results since the implementation of the Common Core standards in more than 40 states, so the decline in math scores is under particular scrutiny—and it’s the first drop in math results since the NAEP was first administered in 1990.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Carol Burris, the executive director of the advocacy group the Network for Public Education, brought the hammer down on the Common Core and its corresponding standardized tests, which are designed to measure student achievement. (President Obama said on Saturdaythat we need less of just that kind of test.)

“Considering that the rationale for the Common Core State Standards initiative was low NAEP proficiency rates, it would appear that the solution of tough standards and tough tests is not the great path forward after all,” wrote Burris. “For those who say it is too early to use NAEP to judge the Common Core, I would remind them that in 2013, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used NAEP increases to do a victory dance about the states that had already implemented the Core at that time—and I never heard any reformer complain.”

Kevin Weiner, executive director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, also criticized overreliance on such testing, writing on the NEPC blog that the scores “are particularly bad news for those who have been vigorously advocating for ‘no excuses’ approaches”—which are heavy on standardized testing.

Weiner pointed out that the results also cast doubt on the education reform rhetoric that “failing” schools “will quickly and somewhat miraculously improve if we implement a high-stakes regime that makes educators responsible for increasing students’ test scores.”

Instead, wrote Weiner, the scores should be a wake-up call “that the achievement gap is caused by the opportunity gap.” The “no-excuses” approach to education has enabled education reformers to ignore “the real-life challenges of living with racism or poverty.”

More than 20 percent of children in the U.S. are growing up living under the federal poverty level of $24,250 annual income for a family of four. Research published in July in the journal JAMA Pediatrics suggested that the effects of poverty on children are so pernicious, it should be classified and treated as a medical condition.

Weiner wrote that education reformers should “admit that those test scores are driven overwhelmingly by students’ poverty- and racism-related experiences outside of school” and that “ ‘failing’ schools are little more than schools enrolling the children in the communities that we as a society have failed.”

Still, Carr seemed optimistic about the future of the Common Core and other education reforms. “One downturn does not a trend make, and that’s what we’re comfortable in saying about this data,” she said. “We don’t know whether the changes are long term. I think we need to be cautious and exercise a little bit of judgment and wait to see what will happen in 2017.”