National Center for Education Statistics and the National Assessment Governing Board
As everyone surely knows, the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Assessment Governing Board have just released the NAEP math results for spring 2000. (By NAEP standards, it's regarded as speedy to get results out just 15 months after the testing is concluded!) There is a huge trove of data here and, like the blind men's elephant, you can perceive it in many ways. If you'd like to show good news, note that 4th and 8th grade scores are rising and that several states are narrowing the black-white gap. If you'd like to show bad news, point out that 12th grade scores are down and that, for the nation as a whole, the majority-minority gaps are wider, even as black and Hispanic youngsters make gains. Many states can find something to celebrate-40 of them took part this time-but few can find unadulterated good news in these data and some (such as California) have to spin hard to find any. Private schools continue to outscore public but non-Catholic private schools showed a downturn in grades 4 and 12, while improving in 8th grade. (If you dig into the NAEP website-see below-you will also find data on several subsets of private schools that have never been separately reported before. These didn't make it into the hard copy report.) In sum, you will surely want to see for yourself. The main report, numbered NCES 2001-517, can be ordered from Education Publications Center, U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794. You can phone (877) 433-7827 or order it through the Internet at www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs/html. You can find the report itself on the web at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/results. A short "highlights" report, available from the same places, is publication number NCES 2001-518. And you can obtain the comments of members of the National Assessment Governing Board, as well as important background information (such as the "framework" around which this assessment was constructed), by going to www.nagb.org. Finally, an interactive data analysis tool is available online at http://www.nces.ed.gov/statchat
