WASHINGTON — Most American fourth- and eighth-graders still lack basic skills in math and science despite record high scores on a national exam.
Yes, today’s students are doing better than those who came before them. But the improvements have come at a snail’s pace.
The 2013 Nation’s Report Card released Thursday finds that the vast majority of the students are not demonstrating solid academic performance in either math or reading. Gaps persist between the performances of white children and their Latino and black counterparts, who scored much lower.
Overall, 42 percent of fourth-graders and 35 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level in math. In reading, 35 percent of fourth-graders and 36 percent of eighth-graders hit that mark.
Still, the nation’s school kids are doing better today on the test than they did in the early 1990s, when such tracking started, with more improvement in math than in reading. Students of all races have shown improvement over the years.
The results come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is given every two years to a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders.
This year’s results, compared to results in 2011, show average incremental gains of about one or two points on a 500-point scale in math and reading in both grades, although the one-point gain in fourth-grade reading was not considered statistically significant.
“Every two years, the gains tend to be small, but over the long run, they stack up,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.
Buckley said he was “heartened” by some of the results, “but there are also some areas where I’d hoped to see improvement where we didn’t.”
Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said the biggest problem revealed in the results is the large gap that exists between the performances of students of different races.
There was a 26-point gap, for example, between how white and black fourth-graders performed on the math section. In eighth-grade reading, white students outperformed Latino students by 21 points.
“We still have a situation where you have kids that are left behind. They aren’t given the same instruction. They aren’t given the same expectations as other kids,” Minnich said.
The exam was given this year to about 377,000 fourth-graders and 342,000 eighth-graders in public and private schools.
