Billy Townsend, Florida blogger, has reported regularly on Florida’s gaming of NAEP scores. He writes here that Governor Ron DeSantis is carrying out Jeb Bush’s old trick to inflate 4th grade NAEP scores. He calls the governor Ron Jebsantis. The trick is third grade retention, which ensures that the lowest scoring third graders never take the fourth grade NAEP test (the kids who take the NAEP test are selected at random).
Thus, DeSantis put out a flashy press release celebrating fourth grade NAEP scores in the test scores recently released. But, as usual, DeSantis neglects to mention the collapse of eighth grade NAEP scores. Somehow the kids who were retained in third grade managed to skip fourth grade and rejoin their classmates by eighth grade.
Here are his numbers, drawn from NAEP reports:
With that in mind, here is a view of Florida’s 2022 NAEP scores peaking in elementary school and dramatically worsening with the older cohorts —- which is ALL of the red numbers after the green baseline.
I personally put no stock in the twelfth grade numbers (which Billy extrapolated) because NAEP stopped testing seniors a decade ago. Seniors know that NAEP doesn’t count and they don’t do their best. Some don’t even try. Their answer sheets had doodles, or some just picked the (A) answer to every question or some were blank.
But the stark drop from fourth grade to eighth grade says something’s fishy in Florida.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Who decided?
Who decided NAEP was cool?
(Must have been a bloody fool)
Who decided NAEP was “it”
(Must have been a testing twit)
Who decided NAEP should be
Standards set for you and me?
This trick is just like laws requiring voter ID. The reason Republicans want voter ID laws, is that they know these laws will restrict voting by people they do not want to vote. Their goal is simply to obey the probability.
Same in using the NAEP. Retain third graders en masse and look good when they are older a bit later. It is not about kids reading, it is about playing probable occurrence to create a political argument.
This is why I oppose all academic testing outside of class. We have pursued this shibboleth for forty years now (I could make an argument for 70 years) and gotten nothing. The normative process begun in the Napoleonic days of France involved making sure that teachers were trained in the reasonable expectations of students. Whatever else you think of old Bonaparte, his idea became the ideal for divergent applications across cultures. In America, we called them Normal Schools. Today many of them are universities. The idea was adopted Across Europe and in Japan.
Testing under this idea was not the tool of the powerful, but was the child of the people who taught the students.
I doesn’t really matter how much the conservatives in charge of the state try to massage the data. According to the rankings Florida gets off to a flying start due to third grade retention. Nobody ever hears about the successive declines in the 8th and the bottom quintile 12th grade scores, not a lot to celebrate in any case. A case could be made that the more time spent in the Florida schools, the greater the declines in standardized test scores. Perhaps it has something to do with all those useless voucher schools many Florida students attend.
Nobody should be obsessing about standardized test scores. Everyone should be more concerned with the mental health and well-being of our young people, many of whom are dealing with trauma and the social isolation of the past two and a half years.
When George Bush was governor of Texas his administration did something similar to create fake success. That Bush’s trick was to lower the reading level kids had to reach to be considered efficient readers. If I recall correctly, the passing reading score was lowered to 3rd or 4th grade so more students would look successful compared to California where that grade level was set at 9th grade.
Only fools and idiots give a damn about NAEP scores.
I put no stock in any scores. Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and it’s application to the education of the child. It’s time we stop giving it credibility by responding to it
Golden line: “Florida’s arc of NAEP collapse is long; and it always bends toward sucking.”
8th graders aren’t particularly wild about take ng the test either. My school has been “randomly” selected for the last 5 cycles now and I hear the kids talk. NAEP is a joke.
Second.
I just vacationed in FLA and was sickened by the Desantis ads trumpeting his “accomplishments “ thus far. What troubles me more is the lack of Democratic response.
On the way home from work today, I thought of this post and how sickening the practice of grade retention is. It’s abusive. It must stop.