MONDAY: We return to results on last year's Naep!

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2026

On the Long-Term Trend version, that is: Friend, did you know there are two different versions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP)?  

The Naep is a widely praised federal testing program in such subjects as reading and math. But did you know that the venerable program comes in two different flavors?

The so-called "Main Naep" is administered to students in Grades 4, 8 and 12, without respect to the age of the various students. This version of the Naep has been given more frequently in recent decades. Results from this version have routinely been reported in the mainstream press over that stretch of time.

That said, please hold on:

There's another version of the Naep called The Long-Term Trend Naep. That version of the Naep is administered to students who are 9, 13 and 17 years old, no matter what grade the students may be in. 

That version of the Naep was administered just last year. It was that version of the Naep to which the New York Times referred in the news report which started this way, headline included:

Younger Students’ Test Scores Bounce Back After the Pandemic   

After years of dire test scores coming out of the pandemic, new national test results released on Wednesday offered a glimmer of hope—at least for younger students.

The nation’s 9-year-olds, who were in preschool when the pandemic hit, have made a significant recovery in reading since 2022, and are now caught up to where 9-year-olds were immediately before the pandemic, according to a key federal exam. They are getting closer to being caught up in math.  

But for American 13-year-olds, whose elementary school years were disrupted by the pandemic, there has been no recovery.

 And so on from there. 

That report appeared on June 10. We told you it would generate zero discussion. If you took that prediction to the betting markets, you're a wealthy person today. 

Attention to such topics has been surrendered to the tsunami of distractions which has constituted the second-term Trump years. But kids continue to go to school, and national samples of such kids continue to participate in this federal testing program.

No, the test items aren't the same on these different versions of the Naep. In effect, the Main Naep and the Long-Term Trend Naep  serve as rough estimates of overall accuracy, the one version paired off against the other.   

There's more to know about the two Naeps. The leading authority on the widely praised program goes on at some length right here.

That said:

How well did 9- and 13-year-old students perform in reading and math last year? Along the way in the next few weeks, we'll provide the basic results the best way we can, thereby filling a void in this Era of Cosmic Distraction.

Having said that, we leave you today with a key observation:   

Assessments of how well the students performed may turn on a basic point. It all depends on how far back you choose to go in making your year-to-year comparisons.   

We'll return to this topic before too long. We'll start our comparisons all the way back around 1980. With that as our starting point, you may be quite impressed with the amount of progress you see...