STATEMENT ON NAEP 2002 READING REPORT CARD

FOR RELEASE
Thursday, June 19, 2003

Contact: Lawrence Feinberg
(202) 357-6942

STATEMENT ON NAEP 2002 READING REPORT CARD

MARK D. MUSICK

President, Southern Regional Education Board;
Member, National Assessment Governing Board

The Nation’s Report Card on Reading that we are releasing today gives a mixed picture. This is not news, in part because NAEP reports are so comprehensive that they almost always contain a mix of good and bad news. But there is some unadulterated, un-spun, clearly good news in this report.

At grade four there seem to be signs of an important turn-around.

Over the past few years, many states have made extraordinary efforts—in pre-kindergarten, in kindergarten, in K-3—to focus on reading and all the skills children need to master it. It was time in 2002 for results of these geared-up reading efforts to begin showing up in the Nation’s Report Card—and it appears that they did. If we had not seen some improvement in reading, I would have been greatly disappointed. In a few more months we will have NAEP reading results for 2003. Then we will be able to see whether we maintain or increase the gains in these 2002 results. I believe we will.

These new results from the 2002 NAEP, which has both national and state samples, indicate progress, most strikingly at the Basic achievement level. Sixteen states and three other jurisdictions show significant gains in fourth grade reading since 1998. And eight of the states making these gains are in the South. That is no fluke. These states are making major efforts to improve reading in the early grades. There is only one state that shows a decline. But this may well have been caused by having more children tested by NAEP, not by an actual drop in achievement.

The apparent turn-around in direction in the early grades, resulting from intensive work, is the good news. The results for grade eight are not good news. The 12^th grade scores and the large, persisting gaps in scores between white, black, and Hispanic students are bad news.

Even with the gains in many states and by almost all racial/ethnic groups, there are major problems, major gaps, major deficiencies that the states and the nation as a whole must try to overcome.

The proportion of white fourth graders reaching the Proficient level in reading has grown to 41 percent. The proportion reaching Basic is 75 percent. By contrast, even with the gains they have made since 1992 and 2000, just 12 percent of black fourth graders reach the Proficient level, and just 40 percent read at the Basic level or above. For Hispanics, 15 percent of fourth graders reach Proficient, and 44 percent reach Basic.

The converse of some of these proportions is what’s really startling, and shows the scope of the reading problem we have. Overall, 36 percent of U.S. fourth graders do not reach the Basic achievement level. This is down from 41 percent in 2000, but still much too high. The group not reaching the Basic level of reading in 2002 includes 25 percent of white fourth graders, 56 percent of Hispanics, and 60 percent of blacks. These are huge gaps, and they are unacceptable.

The problems are made more difficult and more urgent by the fact that the proportion of students in disadvantaged minority groups is increasing dramatically. In 1992, the year when this version of the reading test was first given, blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians made up 25 percent of NAEP’s national sample at fourth grade. In 2002, they accounted for 34 percent of the nation’s fourth graders.

Also, there has been a very substantial increase in the proportion of children who are identified by their schools as limited English proficient (LEP). These LEP students went up from 1 percent of those tested by NAEP in the fourth grade in 1992 to 6 percent last year. And NAEP tests all students in reading in English—there are no translations.

Even though the overall national average for fourth-grade reading is not significantly higher in 2002 than it was 1992, when results are disaggregated they show gains nationwide for white, black, and Asian students. The average score for Hispanic students has gone up four points too, but that is not quite enough to be statistically significant. The reason overall achievement appears flat while almost every racial/ethnic group has improved is that the proportion of students in disadvantaged minority groups has increased substantially over the decade. When minority fourth-graders increase from one-fourth to one-third of the class and students tested with limited-English proficiency go up from 1 in 100 to 1 in 16, these changes do have a real impact on average scores.

It is also important to note that NAEP’s numbers on the proportion of students not reaching the Basic level do not mean that all these children are non-readers. NAEP does not have an achievement level that shows how many children can’t read even a street sign or pick a word off the page. Many of the fourth graders who can’t read at the Basic level can make some sense out of the passages they are given. They can point out some details when asked about them. You can see that in the item map on page 125 of the report.

But the children scoring below Basic in fourth grade do not consistently show that they understand the overall meaning of what they have read. They find it difficult to provide the details that support their understanding or to make simple inferences. Most of the children scoring below Basic at grade 4 can read at least in a very elementary way, but they do have serious reading problems. They can’t read independently and well. And even with the progress that has been made, much more must be done to teach them the reading skills they need.

The high percentage of students not reading at proficient levels and the large gaps between different groups are the most troubling points in these reading results. But the mixed picture about reading in the upper grades—8 and 12—also deserves comment.

Over the past four years, eighth-grade performance has been flat. Average scores have gone up in eight states—five of them in the South—out of the 33 states that took part in NAEP in both 1998 and 2002. But performance declined in five states. And that’s not a strong trend toward improvement. In twelfth grade, the picture is disturbing no matter how you slice it—declines over the past four years, declines over the past ten years, significant declines for both whites and blacks, drooping average scores for Hispanics and Asians that are not quite significant declines.

Even so, and even though it has dropped, the proportion reaching Proficient among 12^th grade students is higher than at grades 4 and 8. It is 36 percent, and this is not for a low standard. To reach Proficient, 12^th graders must analyze what they read and write about it coherently, not just answer multiple-choice questions.

By the time students are in 12^th grade, and in 8^th grade to a large extent too, the reading comprehension that is measured by NAEP requires considerable vocabulary, effective reading strategies, and understanding of content and concepts in a range of subject areas. That’s also what is needed to read well and study in school. Improved reading comprehension in high school comes not from any specific classes in reading but from all the academic subjects—English, history, science—in which reading is required, and concepts and information are learned. Also, since NAEP is not simply a multiple-choice test, the clear writing it requires must be valued by the schools and developed.

And so the slide we see in 12^th grade reading may not just be a problem in reading per se. It may well reflect a much broader problem in the content and demands of high school English courses and of other parts of the high school curriculum. Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable emphasis on upgrading the math required of high school graduates. This seems to be paying off in higher mathematics achievement. But there is far less certainty about what should be done in English, on the liberal arts side of the curriculum. And, even though more students are going to college, about half of them in many states require remedial English courses.

There is one group among the 12^th graders that is having particular problems—the boys. Over the past decade, the reading achievement of male high school seniors has fallen more steeply than among female students. The gender gap between them has widened considerably. Nationwide, just 28 percent of male 12^th graders read at the Proficient level, compared to 44 percent of the female high school seniors, and this is true even though boys have a higher dropout rate than girls.

I am co-chairman of a national commission, convened by NAGB, which is taking a hard look at 12^th grade NAEP. We are considering its content and its standards—what students need to do well in college or the military or at work. We are also looking at the motivation of the students who take the test—there may be problems getting seniors to take it seriously. We expect to make recommendations to the Board next year.

There is also Southern news in this Nation’s Report Card. I take some pride in saying that a disproportionate number of the fourth graders who are reading better, according to NAEP, are reading with a Southern accent. Half of the states that show progress at the fourth grade are members of the Southern Regional Education Board. More than half of the states showing progress at grade 8 are SREB states.

I have been working with NAEP since 1985, when I was vice president of the SREB. People said then we were crazy to try to get involved with a state NAEP test that would give true, up-to-date comparisons. In 1985, every state was at or above the national average on some kind of nationally normed test. Folks told us to leave well enough alone. They said that the South would be far below the national average, as we often were on national comparisons.

We felt then, and I still feel strongly now, that it is very important to have state NAEP reporting on a representative sample of students—not a self-selected group like the SAT. We were convinced that the Southern states would not be as far behind as many suggested and that we could show significant progress, using a true measure. The mathematics results of the 1990s proved this was correct. These new reading results, where the SREB states account for half or more of the states making progress, are very encouraging for our states.

There is one important NAEP message not contained in this reading report, but this report is the first indicator of that message. During 2003, NAEP will be telling the American public more than in any of its 34 years about the achievement of America’s school children. This reading report for the nation and the states will be followed July 1 by a report on reading from NAEP’s trial urban district assessment in five big-city school districts. Then there will the 2002 writing reports for the nation and the states and the five trial urban districts.

In the fall, there will be reports on NAEP’s 2003 assessments in mathematics and reading in all 50 states, as required by the No Child Left Behind law, and in nine big-city school districts, which volunteered for the program. There will be a massive amount of information. It will not be a simple conclusion or a simple headline. But it will help all of us, in the states and as a nation, to see more clearly how well our schools our doing and where we will have to do more.