Faith in Common Standards Not Enough

To summarize, we found no association between state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and ratings of the quality of state standards. We also drew attention to a little noticed finding from a recent federal study: weak to no association between state performance on NAEP and the stringency of performance standards for state assessments. In other words, when indexed by NAEP scores, differences among states in academic achievement do not seem to be related to differences in the quality of state content standards or the difficulty of passing the state assessment.

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