Six Large Urban School Districts to Join The Nation’s Report Card

Las Vegas, Denver, Fort Worth, Greensboro, Milwaukee and Memphis Join the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment Starting in 2017

For Immediate Release: March 8, 2016

(WASHINGTON) – The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will include six more urban school districts from around the country after a unanimous vote Saturday by the National Assessment Governing Board to expand the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) program.

The six districts -- Clark County School District (including Las Vegas); Denver Public Schools; Fort Worth Independent School District (Texas); Guilford County Schools (including Greensboro, North Carolina); Milwaukee Public Schools; and Shelby County Schools (including Memphis, Tennessee) -- volunteered to be part of NAEP administration starting in 2017. TUDA is a special part of the NAEP program that provides results of how fourth- and eighth-graders perform in reading and mathematics in some of the nation's largest urban school districts. The vote of the Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, brings the total number of TUDA districts to 27.

The idea for a big-city version of NAEP, also known as The Nation's Report Card, originated in 2000, when the Council of the Great City Schools -- a coalition of the nation's large urban public school districts led by Executive Director Michael Casserly -- requested that the Governing Board conduct a trial NAEP assessment for large urban school districts that volunteered to participate. Congress first authorized funding for TUDA in 2002, and increases in funding over time have enabled the Governing Board to expand the program.

"The Governing Board values Mr. Casserly's foresight and leadership and the bipartisan support from Congress, the president and the Department of Education to support the expansion of this program," said Governing Board Chair Terry Mazany. "TUDA provides school district leaders, parents and civic leaders with objective and comparable data to measure the progress of student achievement over time in many of the country's largest school districts."

"The addition of these six new cities to the Trial Urban District Assessment of NAEP is a major step forward for the program and will help sustain efforts to improve the nation's large-city public schools well into the future," Casserly said. "We are thrilled that 27 cities will be participating in 2017."

TUDA tests representative samples of students and it reports district-level student achievement results, including trends over time. To be eligible for TUDA, a district must be in a city with a population of 250,000 or more, and at least half of its student population must include minority racial or ethnic groups or must be eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. New TUDA districts must be large enough to support testing three NAEP subjects per year in grades four and eight. The six districts join these other school systems:

• Albuquerque Public Schools
• Atlanta Public Schools
• Austin Independent School District
• Baltimore City Public Schools
• Boston Public Schools
• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
• Chicago Public Schools
• Cleveland Metropolitan School District
• Dallas Independent School District
• Detroit Public Schools
• District of Columbia Public Schools
• Duval County Public Schools (Jacksonville, Florida)
• Fresno Unified School District (California)
• Hillsborough County Public Schools (Florida)
• Houston Independent School District
• Jefferson County Public Schools (Kentucky)
• Los Angeles Unified School District
• Miami-Dade County Public Schools
• New York City Public Schools
• School District of Philadelphia
• San Diego Unified School Distric

"We now have an ever greater geographic representation in TUDA, with four more states included. This will provide the nation with an objective picture of the achievement spanning the diversity of our nation's students, recognizing that the majority of students in our nation's schools is now comprised of minority populations," Mazany said.

View a list of current and eligible TUDA districts. 

Download the PDF format of this release