Northeast Ohio Advocates for Catholic Schools

The nation’s Catholic schools provided a rare highlight among this week’s sobering news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation’s Report Card, a congressionally mandated assessment conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Last month, NCES released a report on the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments for age 9 students through 2022 to examine student achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. It summarized  alarming declines  over the last two years that saw the largest score drops in decades for reading and the first ever for math. In the Diocese of Cleveland, however, Catholic schools did not experience such a decline. Every Catholic elementary student takes the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) MAP® Growth™ assessment, which saw achievement in those similar grade levels remain level or slightly increase over pre-pandemic levels. This local patt...