Every two years, Congressionally mandated tests in reading and math are given to fourth and eighth grade students.
Scores from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests show a continuing decline. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders—the largest percentage ever in the thirty-year history of the NAEP—scored below basic reading levels. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below basic reading levels, the largest percent in twenty years.
If President Trump succeeds in shutting down the US Education Department, the 2024 tests might become the last ones given. And if they are the last ones given, how will parents and educators know if their students are succeeding or continuing to lose ground? Consider:
- Many states mandate reading and math tests each spring beginning in third grade. Yet those state tests are rarely as rigorous as the NAEP tests. A basic score on a state test might earn a student a below-basic score on the NAEP.
- Many studies show students have increased their time watching TV, videos, and video games and using cellphones and social media. I was watching a rerun of an episode of Young Sheldon on which the father tells the high school son to read a book. The son glares at his father with a “You’ve got to be kidding” look, and then he tells the father, You read a book. The father realizes he doesn’t read any more than the son. Gotcha! the son’s eyes respond. And this show was supposed to be happening in 1992. Has anything changed?
- Student absenteeism is higher than at pre-pandemic levels.
- Colleges report on grade inflation by high school teachers. Students whose grades should prepare them for college courses sometimes need to take remedial courses before they can take freshman courses. Even then, these students sometimes drop out, realizing they are not prepared.
- Several states have lowered or eliminated their graduation academic requirements. And states that still have them such as New York face increasing demands that the tests be eliminated.
- Many universities eliminated the need for the SAT and the ACT. But some of them have changed their minds about that and have re-instituted the rigorous exams. Admissions people find those test scores allow them to compare apples to apples, as do AP exams.
Eliminating the NAEP is not the answer. Nor is hobbling the staff of the Institute of Education Sciences, which tabulates statistics on US education. Its staff was 175 at the start of the year and is now twenty.
Do you think your student is receiving an education which would allow him or her to score in the “proficient” range of the NAEP? How do you know? What do you compare your student’s work to? The grades of the student next door? Or a national exam?
comicphonics for early readers 