The Nation's Report Card: A Slow Climb Up a Steep Hill
The “Nation’s Report Card” is out today for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, and while there are some positive trends over the past two decades, a significant achievement gap persists among minorities and for America’s students when compared with their peers internationally.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the Nation's Report Card," is administered every two years to a representative sampling of students. For this year’s exams in math and reading, 377,000 fourth graders and 342,000 eighth graders were tested. Because each state otherwise uses its own mix of assessments, NAEP (along with the SAT and ACT college entrance exams) represents one of the few ways of making comparisons nationally on student performance. You can find a useful overview of the findings by my EWA colleague Mikhail Zinshteyn over at EdMedia Commons.
Among the key takeaways:
Among the key takeaways:
- Math scores rose by 1 point for both grade levels when compared with the