Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam
As we move toward the end of May, the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, will be taking a final look at where low-performing students scored in math and reading on the 2015 test, compared to students in the “High-Achieving” category from the year before.
Those who failed have traditionally been considered among the hardest to fix, so we will find out today whether any of our students improved on the previous year to qualify for a boost in scores for the coming year.
At this point, there is little that we can say about the NAEP results for these students. The last year included high stakes tests at every grade level in reading and math, with a year-end wrap-up on everything that had happened by the last day of school. And there was not a lot of time to digest the data, either. The results were released at the end of May, the very last day of school.
Even then, many of the data points were still being taken down, reviewed, and stored in a database in order for those who had been using computers to do their work to get the grades in those classes. It took some days before we were able to get the reports in.
The data are being put together from all the classrooms that were participating in the NAEP tests over the course of three days at the end of May. Our students are now in the process of getting their results, and after a few more days of testing and grading, we are planning to release a final report with the results and our assessment scores in the June 20th edition of ‘The Journal.’
However, our preliminary analysis of the data suggests that the improvements are not uniform across the state. As you will see, the improvement in reading scores across the state was rather small, in some areas. The national improvement in student reading was about a 7%, according to the latest data. For math, the national improvement was about 2% across the board, and our students in California’s 58 school districts improved slightly more, about 1%.
A couple of things to point out:
There is a lot of variation in the students�