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Congressional Briefing
Wednesday, September 23, 1998

on

Grading the Nation's Report Card:
Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress

For nearly 30 years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has provided the only continuing measure of American student achievement. Its uses have expanded greatly in recent years. Currently, educators and policy-makers seek to use scores from NAEP to justify education reform, to check the results of state tests and other testing programs, and to compare student achievement among states and other countries.

To satisfy these demands, the NAEP program has taken on new and sometimes conflicting objectives, without changing the assessment's basic features. As a result, it has become overly complex says a new congressionally mandated (PL 103-382) report from the National Research Council. The report entitled, Grading the Nation's Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress recommends ways to refocus and streamline NAEP over the next decade.

This briefing was for members of Congress and congressional staff only. The report was publicly released on October 24, 1998 and can be found, in its entirety, on the Web site of the National Academies Press.