If you follow our LTF Teacher Forums or happened to pick up a copy of USA Today, you probably saw  the report from the Center for American Progress indicating schools are not challenging enough.

I was initially skeptical about the student survey results. My knee jerk reaction was that in general, American students have a strong positive self-concept.  So even though some students report math is easy for them, their grades and test scores may not support their claim.

In this case, the survey responses from the NAEP tests mirror the NAEP test scores. Without doing an extensive comparison, I looked at fourth grade responses and the 2011 fourth grade math NAEP test scores and noticed the percentages of students in each category line up fairly closely. This certainly doesn’t tell us that the student saying their math homework is never easy is scoring below basic or that the student saying their math homework is often easy is scoring at the proficient level. But, my skepticism of the students’ survey results seems to be somewhat unfounded.

The real question is – so what? Does this mean as a nation we aren’t challenging our top performers? Quite possibly. The CAP researchers use their findings to support Common Core adoption, but Anthony Cody throws on the breaks to blindly increasing rigor in his EdWeek article.

Cody writes, “This morning's USA Today featured two seemingly contradictory stories. On page one, the headline is "School is too easy, students report." On page seven, an op-ed is entitled "Why our kids hate math." He goes on to make the case that even though we need to raise rigor, it has to be done in the right way. And what is rigor anyways? If yesterday’s article intrigued you, as it did me, then Anthony Cody’s EdWeek post is a must read.

 Related Stories:

• Could School be Both Too Easy AND Too Hard?
• An Important P.S. to the "Schools-Are-Too-Easy" Claim