There was important news on the national student achievement front recently. The results of the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (“NAEP”), otherwise known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” are in. It’s not a pretty picture. The average reading score was the lowest since 1992, and not significantly different from 2002. In mathematics, only 23 percent scored at or above the Proficient level. (The mathematics test was new, so it cannot be compared to previous tests.)
Overall, the percentage of 12th grade students performing at or above the Basic level in reading has fallen from 80 percent to 73 percent since 1992, with the percentage performing at or above Proficient declining from 40 to 35 percent during the same time. In 2005, 61 percent of high school seniors performed at or above Basic in math, and 23 percent performed at or above Proficient.
Sadly, previously released scores in science showed a similar trend for 12th graders, with average scores decreasing since 1996 but not significantly different from results in 2000.
The NAEP is a national test that is one of the few ways we can look at academic achievement nationwide. Care is taken to make the sample of test takers representative of students throughout the country, including students from urban, rural, and suburban environments, all regions, and public and private schools. You can see lots of sample questions at all grade levels, and learn more about all the NAEP tests at:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
As usual, I encourage you to try some sample questions and see for yourself whether you think they are fair assessments of what we might want kids to know.
At the same time as the Department of Education released the 12th grade NAEP results, it released a new study of high school transcripts. Paradoxically, the transcript study showed that 68 percent of 2005 high school graduates completed at least a standard curriculum, up from 59 percent in 2000, and that the overall grade point average was about one-third of a letter grade higher than in 1990.
Transcripts were collected from about 640 public schools and 80 private schools. These transcripts constituted a nationally representative sample of 26,000 high school graduates, representing approximately 2.7 million 2005 high school graduates. The 2005 results are compared to the results of earlier transcript studies, and differences among graduates by race/ethnicity, gender, and parent education are included in the study. To see more, go here:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/hsts_2005/hs_over_1.asp
The NAEP chairman had this to say: “On the surface, these results provide little comfort and seem to confirm the general concern about the performance of America’s high school students. The findings also suggest that we need to know much more about the level of rigor associated with the courses that high school students are taking.”
As a citizen, as a mother of two high school students, and as someone who cares about what happens for kids, these results alarm me. We’ve made significant progress nationally in increasing student achievement in the lower grades. Now we have to figure out a way to improve student achievement in our high schools.