What is NAEP?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is also commonly known as "the Nation's Report Card," and is conducted at both the state and the national level. This assessment has been focusing on what America's students know and are capable of doing in various subject areas by testing representative samples of students in grades four, eight, and 12 in public and nonpublic schools since 1969.
NAEP does not provide individual scores for students or even schools; rather, it offers results regarding subject-matter achievement, instructional experiences and school environment for populations of students (e.g., fourth graders) and subgroups of those populations (e.g. female students, Hispanic students).
NAEP in New Hampshire
2003 marked the first year that New Hampshire has participated in NAEP since 1998. Up to 2003, states were periodically asked to participate in this assessment and could choose to accept or decline the offer. Enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation tied participation in NAEP to the receipt of Title I funding for the district. In New Hampshire this meant in 2003, if any school in a particular school district receiving Title 1 funds is selected, then that school must participate or the entire district risks losing its Title I funding. Beginning in July 2005, the New Hampshire State Board of Education enacted a new rule, Ed 306.24(a)(3) that states:
"(a) The local board shall require that each school:
(3) Selected by the United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics participates in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)."
To ensure accurate results, the relatively small samples of students must be truly representative of the entire student population in the nation (for the national assessments) or the state (for the state assessments). In order to make sure this happens, NAEP selects a representative sample of students by first randomly selecting schools and then selecting the students within those schools who will participate in a given NAEP assessment. Every school has some known chance of being selected for the sample, as does every student within a participating grade.