WASHINGTON – A report that measures the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States shows that Black students made greater gains from the early 1970s than white students.
WASHINGTON – A report that measures the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States shows that Black students made greater gains from the early 1970s than white students.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress recently released its report, "The Nation’s Report Card: NAEP 2008 Trends in Academic Progress." Since 1969, the report has been a continuing and nationally representative measure of achievement in various subjects over time.
“We have two basic types of assessments, what we call Main NAEP and Long-Term Trend,” Stuart Kerachsky, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement. NCES manages the NAEP.
Main NAEP measures grade-based student performance in mathematics, reading and other selected subjects every two years, while Long-Term Trend NAEP provides national-level results for both public and private school students.
Unlike Main NAEP, the Long-Term Trend NAEP assesses students by age rather than grade. The assessment was administered to 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in representative samples of about 9,000 students in each age group, for a total of about 26,000 students per subject. Each student was assessed in one subject: reading or math.
On reading, all three ages were asked to locate specific information in a text, make inferences based on information located in two or more locations in the text, and identify the main idea of the text, Kerachsky said.
At age 9, Black and white students had higher average reading scores in 2008 than in all previous assessment years – the average score for 9-year-old Black students was 34 points higher in 2008 than in 1971, compared to a 14-point increase for white students, according to the report.
Among 13-year-olds, Black and white students had higher scores in 2008 than in 2004 and 1971. Black students showed a 25-point gain in 2008 compared to 1971, and white students showed a 7-point gain.
The report also found that the average reading score increased for white 17-year-olds from 2004 to 2008 but showed no significant change for Black students. Comparing 1971 to 2008, Black students showed a gain of 28 points, while white students showed a gain of 4 points.
The gaps between Black and white students were narrower for all three ages in 2008 than in 1971, according to the report. The gaps narrowed by 20 points, 17 points and 24 points at ages 9, 13 and 17, respectively.
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