Fair question. But it’s hard to get a clear answer when you have lazy reporters who are invested in a particular narrative. Kevin Drum shakes his head at a recent example:
[The] reporter was flatly ignorant of all this, so she simply hauled out standard hysterical template No. 4 and decided that the test results represented “severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education” even though they show no such thing.
This stuff just never ends. I wish our nation’s reporters were required to take a [National Assessment of Educational Progress] test of their own every year. I think that’s probably the only thing that might motivate them to figure out what these scores actually tell us.