The National Assessment of Educational Progress issued another of its Trends reports yesterday (go here and click on the pdf), and stories from around the country picked up on the mixed results it provided, such as this one from The Washington Post with the headline “‘Nation’s Report Card’ Sees Gains in Elementary, Middle Schools.”
The Trends reports provide long-term comparisons in reading and math achievement since the early-1970s for three age groups, ages 9, 13, and 17. The 2004 report also contained abundant data not only on test scores but on leisure habits and home life as well.
The good news is this. Nine-year-olds are going up. Their average score in 1971 was 208, in 2004 216, and in 2008 220.
Thirteen-year-olds, too, have improved, although not as much: 255 in 1971, 257 in 2004, and 260 in 2008.
For 17-year-olds, though, the gains are negligible: 285 in 1971, 283 in 2004, and 286 in 2008. The report concludes that for the older group the “percentages of students in 2008 did not differ significantly from the percentages in 2004 or 1971.” It’s a flat line.
Some people think that improvements in the early ages mean that improvements at the high-school-senior level are on the way. The problem is that younger ages have been improving for several years. In reading, 9-year-olds have risen steadily since the early-90s. One would think that as they proceed through school they would produce parallel gains at age 13 and age 17. But over the same period, reading scores for 17-year-olds have actually dropped, the average score slipping from 290 to 286.
In math, the contrast is striking. In 1992, 9-year-olds scored 230, and by 2008 they reached 243, a significant gain of 13 points. The trend for 17-year-olds: a loss of one point.
In other words, the improvements we see in elementary school decline as the same cohort ages. Something happens to them during the years of middle school and early high school that blunts the progress.
I think part of the answer lies in changes in leisure activity during those years, in particular the inundation of digital diversions (elementary school kids do more offline reading than high school kids do). It’s an open question, however, and a dismaying one. For no matter how well elementary school kids do, their advance doesn’t mean much if when they graduate from high school they stand at 1970s levels — in spite of billions in technology, No Child Left Behind, the standards movement, charters and magnets, one “education” politician after another, an exploding budget for the U.S. Dept of Ed. . . .
