A firm grounding in the faith is, perhaps, the most obvious benefit of a Catholic school education, but it isn’t the only one.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is “the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas,” according to its website.
And Catholic students are doing well, compared to students in public schools.
The schools and students selected to take the assessment represent the diversity of the nation’s students and schools. NAEP assesses a representative sample of Catholic school students in fourth-, eighth-, and 12th-grade, acording to the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA).
The Commissioner of Education Statistics, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education, is responsible by law for carrying out the NAEP project.
Several different breakdowns of Catholic school results are available, depending on the year and the rate of school and student participation.
In 2014, the most current year for which civics, geography, and U.S. history are available, eighth-grade students from Catholic schools on average had higher scale scores than students from public schools in all three subjects, according to a report from the NCEA.
Because the test has been offered for decades and changes little over time, the scores are among the most reliable gauges of student achievement in the nation.
To learn more about the NAEP test, visit http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/
For Catholic school results, see www.ncea.org/NCEA/Learn/Resource_Library/NCEA/Learn/NCEA_Resource_Library.aspx?hkey=4dce95be-9c95-4a11-a88b-612f511a05ab
—Sharon Boehlefeld, features editor