Latest NAEP Scores show: 8th-graders gain, 4th-graders don’t

For the first time since 2003, America’s fourth-graders failed to make any improvements in reading, according to a report released Wednesday from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “nation’s report card.”

For most of the past decade, elementary school students have made steady progress on reading, math, and other subjects, while eighth-graders and high-schoolers have shown more mixed performance. Between 2007 and 2009, it was the eighth-graders who made some slight gains, while fourth-grade scores were virtually unchanged.

Eighth graders’ reading scores have hovered between 262 and 264 since 2002, and have risen 4 points overall since 1992, the year that marks the beginning of this series of reading exams. Fourth graders’ scores, also, have risen 4 points since 1992, and since 2002 have stayed within 2 points of the average 2009 scores.

“What NAEP shows us over almost two decades is that in reading there have been only slight gains and no sustained trend of improvement,” Steven Paine, West Virginia’s commissioner of education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, said in a statement. He called the news “disappointing” given the “considerable amount of effort” devoted to improving reading.

Improvement in reading skills has been one of the main focus areas for states for more than a decade as they have built accountability systems aimed at raising student achievement.

At the federal level, the Reading Excellence Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, brought attention to the need for better reading instruction. The National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which called for better approaches to boosting reading skills, was a key source in crafting the $6 billion Reading First program launched by President George W. Bush as part of his No Child Left Behind Act, signed in 2002.

In spite of those efforts, however, Mr. Paine noted that the proportion of 8th graders scoring at or above “proficient” on NAEP has risen only 3 percentage points, to 32 percent, since 1992. NAEP sets student-achievement levels in three categories: “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced.”

The lack of improvement in 4th grade reading between 2007 and 2009 is “especially disappointing,” Mr. Paine said, because it parallels the December report on NAEP mathematics at that grade level. The math results, however, showed far more growth over time in students’ progress than the new report shows in their reading progress, a difference Mr. Paine deems “striking.”

One reason for the difference, he said, could be that learning math is largely confined to math classrooms, and that the subject is taught in schools with cohesive, sequential curricula reflecting standards adopted by national math groups and echoed in textbooks. Reading comprehension, by contrast, is acquired across all courses, with “no similar cohesion or emphasis” on a clear reading curriculum, he said. Also, students’ reading-comprehension skills can be deeply influenced by what they do outside school, such as text-messaging.