Feds Canceling Tests Will Hide For Years How School Shutdowns Screwed Kids
Four to six months ahead of possible testing times, the test's commissioner pre-emptively canceled this only way to measure the effect of varying school shutdown regulations across state lines.
By Joy Pullmann
December 7, 2020
A federal agency is canceling congressionally mandated nationwide tests scheduled for 2021, ending the only way to reliably measure the effect of different school shutdowns across state lines until approximately 2023, the agency’s commissioner announced the day before Thanksgiving.
“The change in operations and lack of access to students to be assessed means that NAEP will not be able to produce estimates of what students know and can do that would be comparable to either past or future national or state estimates,†said James Woodworth, the commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in a Nov. 25 statement.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a biannual test in reading and math that Congress requires states to participate in to get federal K-12 funding. Because states water down their tests to hide how poorly many American children are educated, and NAEP uses higher standards separated from politically manipulated policies such as teacher evaluations, it is considered the nation’s “gold standard†test. It has operated since 1969, and its next test window is early 2021.
Usually the test results fully come out in the calendar year after they are collected, meaning the postponement likely eliminates this important window into national achievement until 2022. That’s three years of hiding the truth about how governors have damaged American kids and our nation’s future while foreign competitors have kept their children in school because COVID is a low risk for young people.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/feds-canceling-tests-will-hide-for-years-how-school-shutdowns-screwed-kids/
