NAEP, the Long View, and the Crisis in Reading - Dana Goldstein

NAEP, the Long View, and the Crisis in Reading - Dana Goldstein:

NAEP, the Long View, and the Crisis in Reading

by Dana Goldstein

The latest scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress--the gold standard, no-stakes federal test--were released this morning. Only about one-third of American fourth-graders are proficient in reading, and 40 percent are proficient in math. Over the past two years, there has been no statistically significant improvement in the black-white achievement gap, and only a tiny closing of the Hispanic-white gap.
Let's look more closely at the reading scores. First, over the past two decades:


It's important to keep an even longer view in mind when looking at these numbers. Although the picture in math