Brown Center Report on American Education
How Well Are American Students Learning?
This annual report card analyzes the state of American education using the latest measures of student learning, uncovers and explains important trends in achievement test scores, and identifies promising and disappointing educational reforms.
2000 ReportThere was a time when student test scores primarily concerned two groups: individual parents, as they received reports on their children's progress, and real estate agents, as they helped home buyers compare schools in different neighborhoods.
Test scores were difficult to obtain and rarely discussed in public. But now measures of student achievement are splashed across the front page of major newspapers, widely available on the Internet, and the subject of intense scrutiny and furious spin. Politicians closely watch test scores. From the race to the White House to the thousands of contests for local school boards, candidates stretch and bend scores to make them look as good or as bad as possible. Teachers unions and other organizations cite data to defend public schools and assure the public that all is well-or at least not as bad as everyone thinks. On the other side, critics of public schools publish voluminous studies documenting a steady decline in student performance. What should the average citizen believe?
The Brown Center Report on American Education was first published in 2000, and it is released around Labor Day each year. Although varying in content from year to year, the report presents the same three sections. The first section uses the latest and best evidence available to evaluate student achievement in America's schools. The second section goes into greater depth on a theme related to student learning. The third section evaluates the impact of policies and practices on student learning.
The purpose of this report is four-fold: to report on the direction of achievement in U.S. public schools, that is, to determine whether it's going up, down, or sideways; to figure out whether any change that is detected is big, small, or insignificant; to dig under the numbers and uncover the policies and practices influencing the direction of student achievement; and, finally, to figure out whether the public is getting the full story on student learning. Americans spend $350 billion each year on elementary and secondary education. They deserve an accurate, non-partisan, no-holds-barred, data-driven account of what they're getting for their money.
Topics vary widely from one report to the next. In 2000, researchers studied the use of calculators in math instruction and state and federal programs that single out exemplary schools for special recognition. The 2001 report investigated the enormous gap between the U.S. and other nations in mathematics achievement, analyzed the gap between the nation's best and worst readers in fourth grade, and surveyed the culture of the American high school, and looked at achievement in urban schools. The 2002 Brown Center Report addresses how students are performing in arithmetic, the academic achievement of high schools with dominant sports teams, and charter school achievement on state tests. The 2003 Brown Center Report addresses how students are performing in reading and mathematics, the amount of homework that students receive, and presents a follow-up to the 2002 study on charter schools. The 2004 Brown Center Report analyzes the difficulty of items on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), examines the content training of middle school math teachers, and evaluates the Blue Ribbon Schools Program. The 2006 Brown Center Report evaluates the role that student happiness and confidence play in achievement, and examines whether states are artificially inflating the number of students meeting proficiency standards mandated by the No Child Left Behind. The 2007 Brown Center Report examines how well American students are learning in math and reading, the enrollment patterns in private and public schools, and whether more time spent learning math increases achievement.