The nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform group Achieve recently released the report Proficient vs. Prepared 2016: State Test Results are Getting Closer to Student Achievement on NAEP.

The report says that a majority of states are becoming more honest about the proficiency of their students in reading and math after it was revealed eight months ago that most were grossly misleading the public.

Higher standards and modern assessments thanks to the adoption of Common Core Standards could be a big factor in this change.

Called ‘the honesty gap,’ it is the phenomenon that occurs when huge gaps exist between "state NAEP scores and what states report as their proficiency rate,” said HonestyGap.org.

NAEP scores, or the scores on tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), are considered to be the gold standard in judging student assessments.

In August 2015, an eye-opening report from Achieve showed that a majority of states were exaggerating proficiency rates when compared to the results of NAEP state scores; since then many states have been moved into action to become more transparent.

"In the past year, 18 states demonstrated an improvement of at least 10 percentage points by closing The Honesty Gap in both 4th Grade reading and 8th Grade math since 2013 (the last time NAEP was administered),” said Collaborative for Student Success* on the new findings.

And versus 18 states that were determined to be dramatically misleading the public last year, just four states were revealed to be dramatically doing so today. These states have been determined to have an ‘Honesty Gap’ of 35 percentage points or greater: Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts, New York and Utah have state scores that are so closely aligned with NAEP scores they are almost identical (five percentage points or less).

The Collaborative for Student Success says part of this reason for this sweeping change is thanks to "new, higher standards and modern, aligned assessments” that have resulted from the adoption of the Common Core.

"All of the 24 states identified as Top Truth Tellers in 2015 are adopters of the Common Core State Standards or other similar high-quality, comparable education standards (AZ, AR, CO, CT, DC, DE, GA, ID, IL, MA, MD, ME, MI, MS, NH, NM, NY, RI, SC, SD, UT, VT, WV and WI). Conversely, three of the four states in which The Honesty Gap is glaring have rejected the Common Core (OK, TX and VA),” The Collaborative for Student Success said.

*Important to note: the Collaborative for Student Success is a pro-Common Core education group. 

Read more about the honesty gap here and read the full Achieve report here. Take our poll to weigh in .

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

1/29/2016