Dive Brief:
- For students in fourth and eighth grade, mathematics scores fell two points while reading scores fell by three.
- US Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the results disappointing but unsurprising.
- Until this year, scores on national assessment tests had increased over the last decade.
Dive Insight:
Duncan referred to the new scores as having what he called an "implementation dip," warning that it was too early to draw hard conclusions. The NAEP tests don't "align completely with Common Core," but are supposed to test how college-ready students will be.
The Education Trust called the decline in reading and math proficiency sobering. "Most troubling, these data mark the first consistent deviation from the slow but steady gains the nation has seen for low-income students and students of color over the past 20 years," the Trust said in a statement.
In particular, a wide achievement gap between white K-12 students and students of color exists in Connecticut. Detroit was the district that performed the lowest overall in the country. Bright spots include Arizona and Mississippi, where reading and math scores improved for low-income and African American students.
Yet looking at NAEP scores from the 1970's on shows marked overall improvement. Data from the NAEP Long-Term Trend data series reveals math scores rising faster than reading scores.
"Fourth-graders have made greater gains than eighth-graders, and eighth-graders have made larger gains than twelfth-graders," noted Chad Aldeman at Education Next. "In fact, we see statistically significant gains in both subjects and in all races, except the composite scores in 12th grade."