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Education Dive
Disappointing 12th grade NAEP prompts calls for curriculum, funding improvements
Kara Arundel
Oct. 29, 2020
Dive Brief:
National 12th-grade reading and math scores from the 2019 National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mostly held steady on average
compared to performance in 2015, but results from students scoring in
the lowest percentiles dipped noticeably.
A deeper examination of the results, also known as The Nation’s Report
Card, shows a widening gap between the average reading performance of
Black and White students from 1992 to 2019. The gap was 24 points in
1992 and 32 points in 2019, showing the scores of Black students are,
on average, declining faster than those of White students.
More funding and access to high-quality curriculum and instruction
should be priorities if school systems want to better prepare students
for post secondary success, education stakeholders said.
Dive Insight:
The stagnation of the 12th-grade NAEP results should be a “wake-up”
call to the nation that students may not be getting the general skills
they need by the time they graduate high school, said Alberto Carvalho,
superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Miami, Florida,
who participated in an Oct. 28 virtual panel marking the release of the
results.
Carvalho also voiced concern about the pandemic’s impact on student achievement.
“I think the gap that we are experiencing is a result of a disruptive
fourth quarter of last year, compounded by the summer regression,
compounded by a level of disengaged students in the first quarter of
this year,” he said. “You put all those elements together, and we
should be bracing ourselves, quite frankly, for a historic academic
regression the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos also voiced disappointment in
the results in a statement, saying, “This Report Card should light a
fire under America’s education leaders to pivot and try something new
to avert another lost generation. Legislators of both parties should
stop making excuses and start working with their governors and the
White House right now to pass meaningful reforms that empower students
and parents to take control of their education and their future.”
Education-related organizations said schools need to look for solutions
to boost student performance. Trena Wilkerson, president of the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), said the
organization is supporting schools and districts as they look at their
policies and practices to provide students with access to high-quality
math curriculum and instruction.
“We must also step back and see how our national policies are driving
this generational stagnation in mathematics learning,” Wilkerson said
in an emailed statement.
Anna Maria Chávez, executive director and CEO of the National School
Boards Association (NSBA), said in a statement that schools need more
federal stimulus funding to survive the pandemic and to implement
transformative practices. “Public schools need support to reinvent and
improve learning, recruit and support teachers, and close the homework
gap by providing students access to high-speed broadband,” she said.
In Miami-Dade, Carvalho said the district uses a data-driven approach
to understand where the learning gaps are so resources and funding can
be directed to support students in need. The district also uses
inclusive practices and provides a wide variety of courses, including
opportunities for high-schoolers to earn college credits, Carvalho said.
Paul Gasparini, principal of Jamesville-DeWitt High School in DeWitt,
New York, also spoke on the panel, saying his school offers small-group
and one-to-one tutoring to increase student performance. “I think a
combination of those practices with a focus on people… seem for us in
particular to provide some level of success for our most at-risk
students,” Gasparini said.
The 2019 12th grade NAEP results did have some encouraging data: More
than half of high school seniors — 61% — had applied or been accepted
to a four-year college, and more lower-performing 12th-graders reported
they took more advanced math and reading courses compared to
12th-graders in 2015.
The 2019 NAEP was administered between January and March in 2019, and
it had 25,400 students from 1,770 schools taking the math portion and
26,700 students from 1,780 schools taking the reading portion. The
tests were administered in both pencil-and-paper and tablet formats,
and there was no statistical difference in performance between the two,
said Peggy Carr, associate commissioner at the National Center for
Education Statistics, who spoke during the webinar.
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