The National Education Goals Report

1997

National Education Goals Panel

The National Education Goals Panel is a unique bipartisan and intergovernmental body of federal and state officials created in July 1990 to assess and report state and national progress toward achieving the National Education Goals. In 1994, the Goals Panel became a fully independent federal agency charged with monitoring and speeding progress toward the eight National Education Goals. Under the legislation, the Panel is charged with a variety of responsibilities to support systemwide reform, including:

• Reporting on national and state progress toward the Goals over a 10-year period;
• Working to establish a system of high academic standards and assessments;
• Identifying actions for federal, state, and local governments to take; and
• Building a nationwide, bipartisan consensus to achieve the Goals.

Panel members include eight Governors, four members of Congress, four state legislators and two members appointed by the President.

Interpreting the Exhibits

The amount of accelerated progress that must be made if we expect to reach our targets is explicitly shows in 26 exhibits which follow. In order to interpret the graphs correctly, the reader should take note of the following:

[ReadyWeb Editor's note: The NEGP has been dissolved pursuant to congressional mandate.]

1. Baseline measures of progress were established as close as possible to 1990, the year that the National Education Goals were adopted.
2. For some of the national core indicators, baselines could not be established until as late as 1996, either because data were not collected prior to that time, or because changes in survey questions or methodology yielded noncomparable data.
3. Most of the national indicators are not updated annually. Footnotes on each graph indicate when data will be collected again. (See also Appendix A for the national data collection schedule.)
4. Although this report includes the most recent data available, there is sometimes a lag of several years between the time that data are collected and the time that they are available for inclusion in the annual Goals Report. For example, the most recent birth certificate data available to construct the Children's Health Index for this 1997 Goals Report were collected in 1995.
5. On each of the bar graphs, a path from the baseline to the target is represented by a grey shaded area behind the bars. The grey shaded areas indicate where we should try to push our performance each year if we expect to to reach the Goal by the end of the decade. Since progress is seldom perfectly linear, we should expect some ups and downs from year to year. What is most important is whether performance is moving in the right direction and whether it is within, or is at least approaching, the grey shaded area.
6. The graphs themselves should be interpreted with caution. Data are based on representative national surveys, and changes in performance could be attributable to sampling error. The reader should consult the highlight box next to each graph to determine whether the change is statistically significant and we are confident that real change has occurred. Further information on sampling can be found in the technical notes in Appendix B.
7. Finally, the achievement levels, as presented in Exhibits 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11, represent a useful way of categorizing overall performance on NAEP. They are also consistent with the Panel's efforts to report such performance against a high-criterion standard. However, both the National Assessment Governing Board and NCES regard the achievement levels as developmental; the reader of this report is advised to interpret the achievement level results with caution. Further information can be found in the technical notes in Appendix B.

   [ReadyWeb Editor's note: The NEGP has been dissolved pursuant to congressional mandate.]

Go on to the Exhibit page.
Return to the National Education Goals Report Contents Page.
February 16, 1998