Puerto Rico Attains Low NAEP Scores

Students in Puerto Rico’s public schools are faring poorly in mathematics compared with their peers in the 50 states or even large urban districts, according to results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress released today.

Those results from the commonwealth were reported in a complicated format because of concerns about the validity of the scores the 4th and 8th graders received on the 500-point scale normally used in NAEP reports. Instead of scores, or achievement levels such as “basic” or “proficient,” the results are reported as “the overall average of the question scores,” meaning the percentage of correct responses on multiple-choice questions and those requiring short answers, some of which could receive partial credit.

“The reliability of our estimate for the Puerto Rico score was pretty unstable, in that it had a wide margin of error of confidence around the point estimate,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the U.S. Department of Education that oversees the test. “They were much less reliable in terms of our comfort level with particular estimates, and they were...