Giving Compass' Take:

• The National Assessment on Educational Progress results reveal some troubling trends in regard to the gap between the students who are struggling and the ones that are doing well.  

• How can educators encourage all students to take a standardized test and not opt-out? Are we doing a good job of making parents understand why their kids are taking these types of tests and what we can learn from them?

• For an alternate perspective, read about how standardized testing can sometimes hurt students and hinder education reform. 

Few issues have the urgency, stakes, or drama of education, but sometimes the statistics, lexicon, and underpinnings of pedagogy can become all put impenetrable for your average mom and dad.

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, and our newsroom had spent the rest of the day crunching surprising trends.

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.

You don’t go to get a vaccine because you’re sick, I said, but because you’re signing up to be part of a collective effort to build herd immunity. If we all join hands and do it together, we say, we’ll have some baseline protection against any incoming flu epidemic.

We can draw some loose comparisons between that and how we approach standardized tests. It’s not just about measuring one specific child, but about knowing how the collective is doing.

It’s not about where your kid stands, but to see if any gap exists between these affluent students and children in other neighborhoods, or other boroughs, or other cities. Because we’ve decided as a society that everyone is entitled to a meaningful education, and that schools should be lifting up every kid, not just those in the most expensive ZIP codes.”

Read the full article about standarized testing by Steve Snyder at Home The 74