How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition
"Learn to be "see through" graphs to determine what information they actually contain." Gerald Bracey
There is a new story developing in which three crises in education merge:
While it has become popular to blame bad teachers and “kids today” for the reading and math crisis, now it appears that a (or the) cause of the reading and math plummeting scores is the overuse of technology in classrooms.
Except the histrionics in the post above is not just in the words but in the scare version of the line chart that looks a great deal different than the charts created by NAEP. See grades 4, 8, and 12 test score trends on NAEP reading:
Notable is that the trends are significantly flatter than the post on X because the scale score range isn’t distorted.
Also, the trends were flat to rising before the “science of reading” (SOR) reform movement manufactured a crisis and implemented SOR reform starting around 2012-2014 in many states (including Mississippi).
The trends have been declining during SOR reform, although Covid disrupting education must be considered in that decline.
Test data is over-used and misrepresented particularly in education crisis rhetoric by the media and politicians; however, the clear lesson in NAEP data is that anyone wanting to make claims about education must be committed to using the data in ethical and fair ways to make their case—that is, if they have a valid claim to make to begin with.
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