The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has just published their report "Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Variation and Change in State Standards for Reading and Mathematics, 2005-2009"
This research looked at the following issues
How do states’ 2009 standards for proficient performance compare with one another when mapped onto the NAEP scale? There is wide variation among state proficiency standards.
Most states’ proficiency standards are at or below NAEP’s definition of Basic performance.
How do the 2009 NAEP scale equivalents of state standards compare with those estimated for 2007 and 2005? For those states that made substantive changes in their assessments between 2007 and 2009 most moved toward more rigorous standards as measured by NAEP.
For those states that made substantive changes in their assessments between 2005 and 2009, changes in the rigor of states’ standards as measured by NAEP were mixed but showed more decreases than increases in the rigor of their standards.
Does NAEP corroborate a state’s changes in the proportion of students meeting the state’s standard for proficiency from 2007 to 2009? From 2005 to 2009? Changes in the proportion of students meeting states’ standards for proficiency between 2007 and 2009 are not corroborated by the proportion of students meeting proficiency, as measured by NAEP, in at least half of the states in the comparison sample.
Results of comparisons between changes in the proportion of students meeting states’ standards for proficiency between 2005 and 2009 and the proportion of students meeting proficiency, as measured by NAEP, were mixed.
The full report can be found here (PDF). We've pulled out some of the graphs that show Ohio's performance vs the rest of the country for each of the 4th and 8th grade reading and math achievement levels.
