Correction, Please!
“Big Ed” Aces More Spending; Student Test Results Mark Time
Item: After the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, was released in late October, Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss mocked the response by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other conservatives for claiming that the “sky is falling” (the Post’s term) in American education. In the Washington paper for October 30, Strauss tried to shoot down her own straw man — commenting that “if the sky were to fall because of NAEP scores, it would have happened years ago: Overall progress for fourth- and eighth-graders has stayed essentially the same for at least the past decade and for far longer for older students.”
Item: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the results were “not surprising.” “Our students,” she said, are “still bearing the brunt of two decades of austerity.” In her October 30 response to the NAEP Report Card, Weingarten also charged: “Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos ignores the real issues that plague our classrooms and student achievement, presumably because they disrupt her political agenda to siphon public money into private hands and expand private school vouchers and for-profit school ventures.”
Item: The USA Today headline on October 30, above a story on the NAEP results, declared: “Despite Common Core and more testing, reading and math scores haven’t budged in a decade.”
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