Is Academic Achievement Improving or Deteriorating?
What School Board Candidates Need to Know
Image by Sabrina Eickhoff from Pixabay
Overview
Academic achievement in the U.S. has improved over the decades. We know this from what is commonly called the Nation’s Report Card, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). That doesn’t mean we are where we want to be or should be. But the average student is reading and doing math better than the average student of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. This is not the story typically told by those who want to denigrate public education.
Background
Major federal investment in K-12 education began with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. It began with the explicit goal of mitigating the effects of the vicious systems of segregation that had provided drastically different resources to Native, Hispanic, and African American schools in comparison to schools that served white students. Those segregated schools had resulted in enormous gaps in achievement among our different student groups.
Congress wanted to know the effect of the money it was sending to schools, so it created the National Assessment Governing Board, and gave it the mission of giving regular reports on American children’s academic achievement.
The governing board created the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which began by giving reading and math assessments to a national sample of nine-, thirteen- and 17-year-olds.That became known as Long-Term NAEP, which periodically has given essentially the same tests since the early 1970s. This gives us a very broad overview of achievement in the nation. The overall progress can be seen in the table below.
For those who are unfamiliar with NAEP, those point improvements may seem underwhelming, but keep in mind that some researchers say that 11 points on NAEP is equivalent to a grade level. So, to take the most dramatic example, nine-year-olds gained 22 points, or roughly two grade levels, in math since the early 1970s.
It is important to note that scores dropped in the 2022 assessment. Most people attribute the drop to the effects of the COVID epidemic, a mass death event that inevitably disrupted learning. The 2024 assessment will say whether it was a temporary setback or something more lasting.
But the chart below shows that the overall numbers dramatically understate the progress African American and Hispanic children have made through the years. The biggest improvements were from 1971 to 1988 and from 1999 to 2012. The patterns are similar for 13-year-olds in reading and both age levels in math.
The improvement African American and Latino children made was mirrored, though less dramatically, by white students and the students who NAEP lumps together as “other,” a rather large and unwieldy category. But the fact that all student groups improved is a clear demonstration of the fact that education is not a zero sum game–progress for some students need not come at the expense of others. All students can move forward together.
To be clear, the stagnation since 2012 is concerning and has led to a lot of speculation as to the cause. But we have no definitive answers yet.
One drawback of the Long-Term NAEP is that it does not provide state-by-state information. So in the early 1990s the governing board began administering what is known as Main NAEP, which reports national and state results in 4th-grade, 8th-grade, and 12th-grade reading and math every two years, with additional reports on science, civics, history, and writing. Main NAEP tests change somewhat to reflect changes in curriculum, unlike the Long-Term NAEP, where the tests have stayed essentially the same through the years.
Although some states did not initially participate, the 2001 No Child Left Behind law made participation in NAEP mandatory for all states in exchange for Title I money. In addition, some large jurisdictions pay to be included and reported separately (this is known as the Trial Urban District Assessment, or TUDA).
Main NAEP results are reported both by number scores and achievement levels–advanced, proficient, and basic. The achievement levels were very deliberately set at high levels in order to provide what was considered an ambitious goal for American students. “Proficient,” for example, was set at a level considerably above what most would consider “grade level.”
Although that ambition can be considered laudatory in some ways, it has also caused endless confusion and has allowed those who want to denigrate public education to say that two-thirds of students are not proficient in reading and mathematics. They will sometimes conflate proficiency with grade-level and say that most children cannot read or do math on grade level–or even say that most children are “illiterate.”
The governing board’s description of what a "proficient" eighth-grader should be able to do in terms of reading includes the following: "Offer an opinion about the evidence an author uses to support a claim or argument in informational text." That is far beyond basic reading ability.
Even "basic" represents a level that is beyond essential reading ability: “Make a general reference to an appropriate section of literary text or provide some support for ideas related to the plot or characters.”
In 2022 only 33 percent of fourth-graders were considered "proficient" or advanced in reading on Main NAEP; and only 31 percent of eighth-grade students. This was a drop from 2019, which had itself dropped from 2017. But when they first began administering Main NAEP in the early 1990s, only 28 percent of fourth-graders were considered proficient or advanced.
For years we were making slow but steady progress in bringing more children up to basic levels on NAEP. In 1992, 62 percent of fourth graders met or exceeded basic levels; in 2015, 69 percent did. Since 2015 we have backslid, and in 2022 only 63 percent met or exceeded basic levels in reading. Again, that is worth talking about and thinking about in terms of what public education needs to address, but the big picture is that almost two-thirds of students meet basic reading standards and the percentage of students reading at an advanced level has increased, although it is still low–8 percent at fourth grade and 4 percent at eighth grade. The 37 percent of students who do not meet basic reading standards, or are "below basic" are the students who need the most targeted help.
Conclusion
So–big picture: As a nation we have made progress. The majority of children can read and do math.
That does not mean we are where we should be. We should be working toward the goal of all children being proficient as defined by NAEP. And the data that emerges from NAEP are great springboards to ask and answer a whole lot of questions about which policies and practices might be helpful and which harmful. Asking and answering those questions takes thoughtful educators, researchers, and policy makers working to improve public education.
As of March 2025, the Trump administration has begun the dismantlement of the Department of Education and it was unclear if NAEP would be administered. If NAEP does not continue, we will have lost a valuable tool to know how our children are doing academically.
For more information: see the briefs on what school board candidates need to know about: The Federal Role in Education; Assessment; and What Works in Education.
