Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

How sad that a confluence of limited funding, political pressures, and its own history of empire-building has led the National Assessment Governing Board to propose an increase in testing combined with a reduction in the kinds of items and tasks that might actually tell us something worthwhile about student learning ("Board Ponders New Format To Make NAEP More Cost-Effective, Useful," Jan. 24, 1996).

This route for the National Assessment of Educational Progress was perhaps predictable. The governing board has often approved smaller percentages of performance tasks than recommended by its subject-area advisory groups. It has also consistently pushed to expand naep, seeking to make it more like a national accountability exam than an informational assessment. It has initiated proposals for more, and more frequent, testing, and for testing to lower and lower levels, from nation...