Scores on national reading and math tests for 12th-graders look bad—and they’re even worse than they appear. Rather than wringing their hands, officials need to raise the alarm about widespread teaching methods that aren’t backed by science.
At first glance, results of the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for high school seniors, released yesterday, are sobering but not too dismal. Overall, reading scores are down slightly from when the tests were last given, in 2015, and math scores haven’t changed significantly. Sure, it would be nice if the assessment actually showed educational “progress”—rather than stagnation—but we’ve gotten used to seeing little or none of that.
Dig deeper, though, and, as usual, the picture gets grimmer. Basically, the rich are getting richer—not just in terms of wealth or income but also with regard to the knowledge and skills measured by the tests—and the poor are getting poorer. Students are divided into five “percentile” groups, according to how well they scored. Those in the 90th percentile—the top performers—stayed the same or made slight gains as compared to 30 years ago. Those at the lowest percentiles, who are disproportionately low-income and Black or Hispanic, saw significant drops.
Students are also categorized according to their NAEP achievement levels: below basic, basic, proficient, or advanced. There was little change since 2015 in the upper two categories: 24% scored proficient or above in math, and 37% in reading. But there was a slight decline in the basic category—and a corresponding increase in those scoring below basic. In math, 40% of students scored below basic; in reading, the figure was 30%—a higher figure than for any previous 12th-grade NAEP assessment.
This overall stagnation and decline—and the widening of gaps between high- and low-achievers—mirrors recent results on NAEP tests for 4th and 8th graders. But the scores released yesterday got little attention compared to last year’s 4th and 8th grade results. The New York Times apparently didn’t cover the 12th-grade story at all. Maybe we’re just getting inured to disappointing test results, or maybe it’s because—unlike the tests for lower grade levels—the 12th-grade results aren’t broken down by state, eliminating the element of comparison and competition. But surely it’s even more alarming that so many graduating seniors can’t read or do math at the expected levels than that so many younger students can’t, given that high school is our last chance to reach them.
In the past, scores for younger students were rising, but everything seemed to fall apart at high school—and the question was why. As of last year, stagnant or declining scores have become par for the course across grade levels. But the question is still why.
Those who administer the test don’t provide much in the way of answers. Peggy Carr, the NAEP official charged with delivering the dismal news every year or two, essentially just shrugs. Yesterday she called for more research into the “pattern of decline among lower-performing students,” and said “we can’t be sure” why the gap between them and high-performers is growing. The only explanation she offered was that fewer students are dropping out of high school, with the result that more low-performing students are still around in 12th grade to take the test. That, she said, “is a good thing.”
But researchers have found no evidence to support the theory that declining dropout rates are a significant factor in declining high school test scores. And even if that were the explanation, it’s hardly a “good thing” that we’re graduating students who are way behind where they should be academically. Maybe we’re just pretending to educate many students, with the result that high school diplomas mean less than they used to. That’s backed up by NAEP data showing that higher percentages of students report taking more advanced courses while failing to do any better on the tests. Courses labeled “trigonometry” or “AP English” may not mean much if most of the students are unprepared to do the work.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for her part, expressed alarm about the results but offered no analysis. Education leaders, she said, need “to pivot and try something new to avert another lost generation.” As teachers can attest, education leaders are always “trying something new.” One researcher has found that the average urban school system launches three or four major reform initiatives every year. Few of these efforts have much effect. Is there “something new” out there that could make a difference?
Yes, there is. While Carr called for more research, there’s already a whole body of scientific knowledge on how people learn that could boost achievement for all students and narrow the test-score gap. But few teachers are aware of it, and it rarely shows up in classroom practice.
Some of that science has to do with ways to help students retain and analyze information—things like retrieval practice, which requires students to recall information they’ve slightly forgotten. Even more fundamental, though, is well-established evidence on how children learn to read, both in terms of sounding out words and understanding what they mean. Because many teachers are neither aware of that evidence nor given curricular materials that reflect it, students who start out behind in terms of skills and knowledge generally fall farther and farther behind their more advantaged peers every year they stay in school. By the time they reach high school, they’re often so far behind that it can be a Herculean task to catch them up.
Of course, test scores alone don’t tell us all that. They just indicate that whatever we’ve been doing isn’t working. But officials like Carr could connect the test results to the gap between classroom practice and existing research. The federal government doesn’t have control over things like teaching and curriculum, but it could at least raise awareness of the problem.
Change at the state and local level is more feasible, and it’s already beginning to happen. Mississippi, for example, recently managed to raise its dismal 4th-grade reading scores, apparently by familiarizing teachers with the science on word-level reading. In other places, schools are implementing recently developed elementary curricula that also provide children with the kind of knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand the texts they’ll be expected to read on tests and at upper grade levels—knowledge and vocabulary that children of more highly educated families acquire at home.
This localized change is spreading slowly, and it’s coming too late for the high school seniors who took the NAEP last year—61% of whom said they had applied to or been accepted by a four-year college, although only an estimated 37% are ready for college-level work. Maybe in five or ten years, these local efforts will produce some results. But if 12th-grade test scores continue to be reported only for the entire nation, rather than for individual states or districts, it’s going to be hard to tell what’s working and what’s not.