Radical Solution to NAEP Score Drop

Some real outside the box thinking here.

The NAEP results have been a big talking point, a way to trumpet the "failure" of the public school system. Will changes in US schools raise the scores? 

We may never know, because the NAEP is now one more victim of Trusk spending cuts.

“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in an email to state officials. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”

I would have expected more squawking, but so far only The74 and Education Week have reported on this. 

The test is federally mandated, which means President Musk shouldn't be able to legally cut it off, but we all know how much that means these days. Ed Week reports that "the decision appears to have been made without the approval of the National Assessment Governing Board," which seems about par for the course. 

What has actually been canceled at this point is the test for 17-year-olds that was supposed to happen in the near future. Nobody seems to really know whether this cancellation will also affect all other future NAEP testing, but since Musk has gutted financing for the Institute of Education Sciences, the data wing of the education department, it sure doesn't look good.

So much for all those fun conversations folks were going to have while parsing the test scores and arguing about what they meant for public schools in a post[sic] pandemic world. 

Regular readers know that I have no deep love for Big Standardized Tests, but the whole School Criticism Industry has depended on these scores, and I don't know what the heck they're going to do with themselves without the data.

Perhaps the next phase will involve the Musk Method that has been used so expansively in the DOGE process. Never mind talking to experts, don't try to look at actual data, but just kind of eyeball things and make declarations based on how you personally feel about it, unhampered by any actually reality. Boy, those are going to be some fun times.