We Just Lost 40% of Pre-Pandemic Gains – Our Students Deserve an Urgent Response
By Arthur VanderVeen, Chief Executive Officer of New Meridian You could hear the collective gasp from American educators when the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recently released post-pandemic testing results. While we have all experienced first-hand the disruption wrought by COVID-19, seeing students’ learning loss quantified in the form of declining scores was nothing […]
The True Costs of Low-Quality Assessments
The difference between high-quality and low-quality assessment is both dramatic and consequential, and educators need to understand the systemic impact of quality—especially in today’s environment
Bringing Local Agency and Voice to Design Fair Assessments
A state’s academic learning standards not only define what students should know and be able to do at each grade level, they signal a society’s values. Part tradition, part research, part social construct, and part political process, they define what we collectively believe the next generation of students must know not only to succeed personally […]
The Equity Paradox
How do we weigh the challenges of testing this spring against the need to initiate a years-long recovery effort that will certainly require good data?
We Need State Testing Data to Address the COVID Slide
So many of the established routines of our shared civic life have been suspended. While we wait hopefully for a vaccine that appears to be just around the corner, new COVID cases are spiking, lockdowns continue, unemployment benefits are expiring, and most of our schools remain closed to in-person learning. Our lives feel suspended. And […]
Now More Than Ever, Science Education is Vital
Not long after the White House declared the pandemic a national emergency in March, hope could be found in laboratories all over the country. Operation Warp Speed brought government agencies and the nation’s top pharmaceutical companies together and provided billions of dollars for a massive push to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by January of 2021. […]
We Can’t Afford to Lose Any More Time
As states grapple with the challenges of safely reopening our economy, district superintendents across the country are wrestling with what may be the hardest decision of their careers: How to safely open school in the fall. Districts are beginning to announce their plans, and families are facing the hard reality that school will not likely […]
What Aren’t We Getting Right About Literacy Instruction?
Prompted perhaps by the recent release of disappointing NAEP reading scores, many state education leaders are asking, what aren’t we getting right about literacy instruction? Recent conferences and panels focus on the “science of reading,†but a larger, related issue is also surfacing: are our schools starving students of important historical, cultural, literary, and technical knowledge by […]
What is Tested is What Gets Taught
Recent disappointing results on NAEP and PISA have prompted many policy makers and pundits to question the billions of dollars invested in large-scale, standards-based reform initiatives.