States are “not leveling with students or parents” because they’re representing that “students are proficient when by external benchmarks they’re not,” Achieve President Michael Cohen told reporters in a conference call, as reported by Education Week. The article went on:
“The report separates states into categories according to the size of their gaps: “truth-tellers,” which have tests that produce proficiency rates closer to NAEP, and “biggest gaps,” which… well, speaks for itself. More than half the states have proficiency gaps of 30 points or more, according to the report. …
Here is an example of what Achieve and the Collaborative call “the honesty gap.” In 4th grade reading, you can see that Georgia has the biggest gap: a 60-point differential between the proficiency rates its own tests reported in 2013-14, and those on the 2013 NAEP. New York has the narrowest differential, with only a 5-point gap.”