NAEP Board Fires Researchers Critical of Standards Process

By Robert Rothman

WASHINGTON--The governing beard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress has fired a team of researchers that prepared a critical evaluation of the beard's process for setting achievement levels for use in reporting results of NAEP's 1990 mathematics assessment.

In a letter to researchers and policymakers who had received a draft copy of the final report, officials of the National Assessment Governing Board called the draft "so thoroughly flawed as to be unsalvageable."

In addition to numerous "egregious errors and misstatements of fact," the officials stated, there is a "purposeful lack of objectivity...