FL: Blaming NAEP

It's been NAEP week, prompting all manner of data spasms among any education policy people who weren't already staggering under the weight of Trump's zone flooding. And Florida has a problem.

As long time readers know (hi, Mom!), I'm not one to get excited about scores on the Big Standardized Test, despite the claims that it will tell us How Schools Are Doing. There are lots of reasons to suspect that America's Gold Standard of Testing is not all the gold standardy. And there is one serious lesson to be learned, which is that having all this cold hard data doesn't actually change a damned thing-- everyone just "interprets" it to support whatever it is they wanted to do anyway. 

And if you want to see that principle really in action, let's head to Florida.

Florida has spent the last decade cranking up the voucher and charter volume, proudly came back fast from the pandemic shutdown of school buildings, boosted classical education, plugged the Science of Reading, and even tried to imitate Dolly Parton. 

They have reaped the lowest reading and math scores in twenty years.

Now it's worth noting that, as Billy Townsend told people repeatedly, Florida's success with NAEP fourth grade test scores was a magic trick whose effect would completely vanish by eighth grade; Florida's students would perform worse as they moved up.

So besides pointing at all the various reforms that Florida has thrown at its students, one might also conclude that this year's scores may have just gotten closer to reality.

But Manny Diaz, Florida's underqualified education chief, has another explanation.

It's the test. You see, they are awesome in Florida, but--

However, upon receipt of Florida’s 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, it is evident that the Biden Department of Education’s administration of what was the previously gold standard exam has major flaws in methodology and calls into question the validity of the results as they pertain to the educational landscape in 2024.This is why I sent incoming Secretary of Education Linda McMahon a letter outlining concerns and providing solutions so that together, we can make NAEP great again.

See, the problem is that over half a million Florida students are homeschooling or using their taxpayer-funded voucher to attend private school, so NAEP is only testing the students left behind in public school (this, somehow, is Biden's fault). Since 2022, Florida has gone from 165,000 voucher students to 524,000, and leaving them out has hurt the state score.

I'm not sure that Diaz fully grasps that he has argued here, in print, that Florida has made its public school system measurably worse. 

He also argues that the scores are too heavily weighted toward urban, high-poverty, high-minority districts, which, again, serves as a sort of admission that the state hasn't served those districts well. 

NAEP scores are used for a variety of poor purposes-- misNAEPery-- so I sympathize with Diaz. Who knows-- maybe he'll be able to interest McMahon in a little NAEP cookery. On the other hand, private and home schoolers may share some thoughts with him regarding how they feel about being compelled to take the federal Big Standardized Test.