Christmas came early for policy wonks as the 2015 NAEP results were released on Tuesday. Overall, aggregate results were slightly down in each subject except for 4th grade reading, which stayed flat. While high-level trends are important, the real of value of NAEP is in the details.
The first two questions I wanted to explore are:
1) How do states compare when you isolate results for students who are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (FRL)? Aggregate results fail to account for differences in student populations, so comparing FRL data can help us make more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
2) How big is each state’s achievement gap between FRL and non-FRL students? This doesn’t necessarily tell us how well states are doing in addressing their respective achievement gaps (growth data would help with this) but it does provide a status-check of sorts to indicate how far they need to go.
I’ll write more as I dig further into the data. In the meantime, the two sets of interactive graphs below help to explore these questions.
<a href=’/blog/show/2015-naep-results-frl-student-compa’><img alt=’Dashboard 1 ‘ src=’https://public.tableau.com/static/images/20/2015Avg_NAEPScoreFRLEligibleStudentslist/Dashboard1/1_rss.png’ style=’border: none’ /></a>
&lt;a href=”&gt;&lt;img alt=’Dashboard 2 ‘ src=’https:&amp;#47;&amp;#47;public.tableau.com&amp;#47;static&amp;#47;images&amp;#47;20&amp;#47;2015Avg_NAEPScoreFRLEligibleStudentslist&amp;#47;Dashboard2&amp;#47;1_rss.png’ style=’border: none’ /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
&amp;lt;a href=”&amp;gt;&amp;lt;img alt=’Dashboard 4 ‘ src=’https:&amp;amp;#47;&amp;amp;#47;public.tableau.com&amp;amp;#47;static&amp;amp;#47;images&amp;amp;#47;86&amp;amp;#47;868GQFKZH&amp;amp;#47;1_rss.png’ style=’border: none’ /&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;
<a href=”><img alt=’Dashboard 3 ‘ src=’https:&#47;&#47;public.tableau.com&#47;static&#47;images&#47;20&#47;2015Avg_NAEPAchievementGapFRLvs_Non-FRL&#47;Dashboard3&#47;1_rss.png’ style=’border: none’ /></a>