The Nation’s Report Card: Failing the Future
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) recently released its latest report (the “Nation’s Report Card”), which is causing an uproar. NAEP is the largest nationally representative continuing evaluation of the condition of education in the United States and has served as a national yardstick of student achievement since 1969.
A sampling of 4th, 8th, and 12th graders is evaluated every two years, and most recent results indicate continued declines in reading for students, a compounding decline in reading scores that began even before the pandemic. No state saw any gains on NAEP Reading in either grade compared to 2022.
“Student achievement is the cornerstone of national success and security. This makes a lack of academic progress today a direct and urgent threat to our collective future.”
Kelly continues, “The continued declines in reading scores are particularly troubling. Reading is foundational to all subjects, and failure to read well keeps students from accessing information and building knowledge across content areas.”
Despite a slight uptick in fourth-grade math scores, reading scores dropped to a historic low for eighth graders, with 33 percent scoring below the lowest level “basic.” Forty percent of fourth graders also fell into that category, the highest proportion in 20 years.
The lowest-achieving students drove the decline. Scores of high performers stayed stagnant, but the scores of lowest performers dropped increasingly. This emphasizes an increase in inequality, which is not new information. NAEP scores have long reflected inequality and the gap between high and low scores has expanded for many years. Those gaps have almost always been reported in terms of race and ethnicity instead of income or socioeconomic status, and this has been partially due to a lack of confidence in the standard measure of income: whether students qualify for free or reduced school meals. This year NAEP added two additional criteria: the number of books in a student’s home and the highest level of education of either parent.
According to Natalie Wexler’s reporting, based on these additional factors, 77 percent of students from high socioeconomic families scored above the national average in reading, compared with only 33 percent of those from low-socioeconomic families. There are gaps based on race as well; 66 percent of white students scored above average versus 36 percent of black students.
It is important to note that NAEP is not a randomized controlled trial, so it is not entirely feasible to infer the reasons for a change in results with any real degree of confidence. That said, it does not stop folks from speculating. The most obvious reason is the pandemic; however, scores were declining, and gaps were already widening before the pandemic.
Lately, there has been a hot buzz about the “science of reading”: this theory embodies converging fields of research that establish a scientific basis for how the brain learns to read and why students struggle. Many news outlets have been shocked at the drop in scores given the embrace of this trend, which has come to mean increased and new “phonics” instruction in our schools; this is the idea that we need to explicitly teach students how to read words by emphasizing the correlation between sounds and letters. That said, does the NAEP measure whether students can read individual words or comprehension itself?
Many experts comment that we have made the mistake of trying to teach comprehension as though it were a set of “transferable skills” when, in fact, it is far more dependent on knowledge.
A large body of research indicates that comprehension strategy building is important but that teaching some strategy over and over is less helpful. It takes relatively little (4-5 lessons) for the strategy to stick!
Natalie Wexler and Hugh Catts are but a few researchers who tell us that whether you can find the main idea of a text has more to do with whether you have relevant knowledge in long-term memory than with how much you have practiced finding the main idea. Systematic reviews show that content-rich literacy programs successfully increase vocabulary and content knowledge, as well as performance on standardized reading comprehension tests (Hugh Catts Rethinking Comprehension). Despite the importance of knowledge, content knowledge has typically been neglected in comprehension instruction in favor of comprehension strategies building such as finding the main idea, summarizing and making predictions.
Do we want a national test that focuses on assessing whether kids are learning how to decode words or whether or not they understand what they read? Integrating comprehension within content-building instruction would give attention to the main purpose of comprehension in schools, which is learning. Students will still be taught how to best understand what they read, but this would now be done in the context of actual learning itself: comprehension building strategies in synergy with knowledge building.
