Morgan Polikoff says enough is enough when it comes to misNAEPery

The long and the short of it is that any stories that come out in the weeks after NAEP scores are released should be, at best, tentative and hypothesis-generating (as opposed to definitive and causal effect-claiming). And smart people should know better than to promote inappropriate uses of these data, because folks have been writing about this kind of misuse for quite a while now. Rather, the kind of NAEP analysis that we should be promoting is the kind that’s carefully done, that’s vetted by researchers, and that’s designed in a way that brings us much closer to the causal inferences we all want to make. It’s my hope that our work in the C-SAIL center will be of this type. But you can bet our results won’t be out the day the NAEP scores hit. That kind of thoughtful research designed to inform rather than mislead takes more than a day to put together (but hopefully not so much time that the results cannot inform subsequent policy decisions). It’s a delicate balance, for sure. But everyone’s goal, first and foremost, should be to get the answer right.