The ‘Sobering’ News in Today’s NAEP Results
After years of improvement for low-income students and students of color, today’s National Assessment of Educational Progress results show that, in some grades and subjects, performance has stalled or fallen.
“Any way you look at it, today’s NAEP results are sobering,” our president, Kati Haycock, said in a statement earlier today. “While there may be plausible explanations for these patterns — among them the disruptions caused by the transition to new standards — any interruption of the slow but steady progress these groups have made over the past two decades is cause for great concern.”
Our K-12 team is combing through the data, with these key questions in mind. They’ve sorted states’ and districts’ NAEP scores for each of the data sets (fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, eighth-grade reading, and district-level data), so you can see how groups of students compare on 2015 performance and improvement since 2003. You can also see the size of the gaps separating black and Latino students from their white peers, as well as those separating lower income from higher income students.
Stay tuned for further analysis from our K-12 analysts. We’ll update here.
