08/02/05–Nine-year-olds made steady progress in reading and mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) during the past 30 years and made the steepest gains during the first years of this decade. But 13-year-olds made less progress, and scores for 17-year-olds hardly changed.
African-American and Hispanic students are showing strong progress at the elementary school level, and the achievement gap between white and black 9-year-olds narrowed significantly.
The NAEP study, Long Term Trends, released July 14, is based on a test given to a representative sample of 28,000 public and private school students in all 50 states in 2003 and 2004. The test was last given in 1999.
The Bush Administration was quick to claim that the rise in test scores is evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is working. In a speech to members of the Education Commission of the States, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said: “We’re seeing such great progress in the early grades because that’s where we’re investing our resources with [NCLB]. Resources plus reform equals results.”
But Darvin Winick, chair of the National Assessment Government Board, which oversees NAEP, urged caution about attributing the gains to NCLB, noting that the achievement gap began narrowing in the late 1990s, while NCLB wasn’t enacted until 2002.
The average reading score for 9-year-olds in 2004, 219, was the highest it’s ever been and was a statistically significant increase from the average score of 212 in 1999.
For 13-year-olds, the average score was 259 in 2004, the same as in 1999. The average score for 17-year-olds declined from 288 in 1999 to 285 in 2004.
For all three age groups, the gap between white and black students in reading decreased between 1971 and 2004. The gap narrowed the most among 9-year-olds. The average scores of black 9 and 13-year-olds increased substantially between 1999 and 2004.
Female students outperformed males in reading at all three age groups. Seventeen-year-olds had the biggest gender gap in reading.
In math, the average score for 9-year-olds rose significantly from 219 in 1978 to 232 in 1999 and to 241 in 2004.
The average score in math for 13-year-olds was 281, a solid gain from 276 in 1999.
For 17-year-olds, the average score in math was 307 in 2004, a one-point drop from 1999. Math scores for this group did not show much movement since the early 1990s.
At all three ages, Hispanics’ average scores in math were higher in 2004 than in 1973. The white-Hispanic score gap was significantly smaller in 2004 than 1999 for all three ages.
In 2004, male 13 and 17-year-olds outscored their female counterparts, but the difference was not statistically significant for 9-year-olds.
Among other results:
• Students were asked how many pages they read every day for school and homework. For 9-year-olds, the percentage of students who read more than 20 pages a day increased from 13 percent in 1984 to 25 percent in 2004.
• There was also an increase in the number of pages read by 13-year-olds but there was no statistically significant difference for 17-year-olds.
• In 2004, a higher percentage of 13-year-olds was enrolled in algebra (29 percent) than in any previous assessment year.
• A greater percentage of white, black, and Hispanic 17-year-olds indicated their highest course was second-year algebra in 2004 than in 1978.
• In 2004, 19 percent of white students took calculus, compared to 14 percent of Hispanics, and 8 percent of black students. That compares to 15 percent of whites, 8 percent of Hispanics, and 4 percent of blacks in 1999.