High School Students Show No Progress in Reading
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 03/07/2007
Don't be fooled. Although high school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, their reading and math scores haven't improved, according to two recent federal reports.
The conflicting picture of educational achievement was released in "The Nation's Report Card: 12th-Grade Reading and Mathematics 2005" and "The Nation's Report Card: America's High School Graduates." The reports, sponsored by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—and commonly referred to as the nation's report card—say that the reading scores of 12th graders who were tested in 2005 showed no progress from those tested in 1992.
Overall, the percentage of 12th graders performing at or above the basic level in reading fell from 80 percent in 1992 to 73 percent in 2005. At the same time, the percentage of students performing at the proficient level declined from 40 to 35 percent. In math, 61 percent of seniors performed at or above basic level in 2005, and 23 percent performed at or above proficient.
But a review of the transcripts of graduating seniors in 2005 shows that the overall grade point average was about one-third of a letter grade higher than in 1990 and that 68 percent of seniors completed at least one standard curriculum, up from 59 percent in 2000.
"On the surface, these results provide little comfort and seem to confirm the general concern about the performance of America's high school students," says Darvin Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing board, which oversees NAEP policy. "The findings also suggest that we need to know much more about the level of rigor associated with the courses that high school students are taking."
The tests were given to 21,000 students in 900 public and private schools, and the second report examined 26,000 student transcripts. For copies of the reports, visit nationsreportcard.gov.
