My Back Pages

Assessment: A Forward Look

David Snyder

As we consider how best to use multiple measures of assessment to determine the success of our schools, it's instructive to look back at the dawn of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which in its infancy used a far greater diversity of measures than it has in recent years.

In the November 1966 issue of Educational Leadership, J. Raymond Gerberich, an education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, describes the thinking behind the development of NAEP, which wouldn't be administered until 1969.

Read the article: Assessment: A Forward Look (PDF)

According to Gerberich, it was designed to "obtain evidence about the progress of American education that will parallel the information presently supplied by an economic index, the Gross National Product." He recommends that in addition to basic skills and content areas, "interests, habits and practices" and "societal outcomes" should be assessed to give a fuller picture of U.S. schools.

As Richard Rothstein detailed in his recent book, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, and as explained in a concurrent Education Week summary, early NAEP assessments were intended to measure elements such as students' ability to cooperate, demonstrate personal responsibility, and consider alternative viewpoints. Rothstein laments that budget cuts led to the narrowing of the scope of NAEP—and that this narrowing, and the even tighter focus of NCLB, resulted in a distorted picture of education progress and created the wrong incentives for educators.

Gerberich sanguinely states that “the misunderstandings, misinterpretations and unfounded beliefs that have for generations distorted the thinking of many citizens concerning the schools . . . should have little foundation for continuance after the assessment project becomes functional." In the view of those who decry the narrowing of assessment, Gerberich's prediction would yet be proven right, if NAEP's original scope were only restored. 

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members can access EL issues from 1943 to the present by signing in at the right.

David Snyder is a reference librarian in ASCD's Information Resource Center.