No Child Left Behind (NCLB) isn’t the only big four-letter acronym in education that desperately needs updating, says The Hechinger Report today.

Also in dire need of an update is the National Assessment of Education Progress, the nationwide U.S. exam that The Hechinger Report says has been unchanged since 1990.

Fran Stancavage of the American Institute of Research helps the U.S. government develop the NAEP, and she said during her research she found several mismatches between the Common Core and the NAEP.

Stancavage found that many changes in instruction dictated by the Common Core are not being reflected in the NAEP.

In many cases, specifically considering geometry knowledge, the Common Core changed what grades students are exposed to certain material, and this change is not reflected in the NAEP.

Additionally, "kids are learning a lot of new material under Common Core that NAEP isn’t testing. Stancavage calculates NAEP isn’t testing 42 percent of the math content that a Common Core-educated eighth grader has been taught,” the article said.

That’s right, the NAEP does not test a Common core-educated eighth grader on just a little under half of what he or she has been taught.

Stancavage “argues that it’s time to revamp NAEP. 'If you start getting too far away from what’s going on in classrooms, which appears to be what is happening now, you don’t really have a trend — you’re picking up an artifact of the test not matching the curriculum.’"

Read the full story here.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

11/09/2015