Giving Compass' Take:

• Steve Snyder explains that standardized tests are not about how your child is doing in school, but how the population and segments of the population are doing over time and in comparison to one another. For example, this year's NAEP scores revealed a widening gap between wealthy and poor students.

• How can parents, philanthropists, and advocates help to spread understanding of the importance of participating in standardized testing? How can tests be improved to offer more nuance? 

• Frederick M. Hess questions what NAEP scores actually measure. 

As editor of the education news site The 74, I spend most days thinking about how to translate edu-speak for mainstream readers, about how to entice busy parents to join us for a jog into the weeds of policy, finances, curriculum, standards, equity, and innovation.

So imagine my surprise when the other night, a couple of friends without kids were the ones to raise education over dinner.

The cause: the latest update to what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card that had been making headlines all afternoon. Fresh results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been released that morning, showing mostly flat reading and math scores across the country.

One of my friends said he understood tests within a specific class and subject area, to measure whether a student had fully mastered the material. But why the same tests across all students at a school? Across all schools in a district? Across all districts in the country?

Tests aren’t about your kid; they’re about ensuring a baseline for all kids. About having the information to better understand which kids are not getting the help we have all promised to give them.

As I explained to my alarmed friends: The gap between the top and bottom is getting wider. Struggling students are falling even further behind. And the only way we can possibly know that is some form of standardized test, tracking where we are versus where we’ve been.

Read the full article about standardized tests by Steve Snyder at The 74.