With encouragement from the Council of Great City Schools and various dispensations and special funding from the powers that be at NAEP, a handful of America's big-city school systems are doing something gutsy and important: administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests to representative samples of their 4th and 8th graders and allowing the results to be reported just as if they were states instead of districts.
Classically, NAEP hasn't reported on any identifiable units smaller than states. (Until a decade ago, it didn't report on anything smaller than regions of the country!) A number of people-myself included-have felt for a long time that districts, too, should be able to track their students' and schools' progress on NAEP in relation to that assessment's achievement levels and in comparison with national and statewide performance.
In 2002, five courageous districts (Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York City) took part in NAEP's 4th and 8th grade assessments of reading and writing. (So did the District of Columbia, but it was already being reported among the states.) In 2003 they were joined by Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland and San Diego - those results are expected out in September in reading and math.
The 2002 results - out this week - aren't good. By and large, the kids in these cities did worse than the nation, worse than their states, worse even than the national central-city average. They basically got scores similar to the national average for Title I schools, which isn't really too surprising. When disaggregated by race, there were some interesting if limited exceptions. (Hispanic kids in Houston did better than Hispanic kids in central cities nationwide, though Blacks and Hispanics in Chicago and Los Angeles did worse. White kids in Atlanta and D.C. - small populations to be sure - did better than white kids nationally.)
One assumes the home town papers and civic leaders in these cities will give their school systems a drubbing because of the fresh evidence of how far they have to come to get their kids up to "basic" on the NAEP scale, let alone to "proficient." And yet the proper way to view these data is as a revealing baseline-and the leaders of these schools systems deserve praise rather than brickbats for their willingness to engage in this kind of honest comparison with the nation's gold-standard assessment system and their embrace of the principle of transparency. May their fine example spread. For the executive summary of both reports, go to http://www.nagb.org/release/summary_7_03_02.html; for the reading report see http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003523, and for the writing report, http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003530.
