Achievement gap for US students hasn't narrowed
Far more minorities score lower
NEW YORK - The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation's best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.
Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush's frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.
Although black and Hispanic elementary, middle, and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and '80s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is "An Act to Close the Achievement Gap."
"There's not much indication that [No Child Left Behind] is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for," said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing specialist who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. "Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn't seem to be happening."
The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. "We still have a lot more work to do," Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law's accountability model itself.
Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of America's 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely because of a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.
The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were higher than those of students of the same age a generation ago. The progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.
Some specialists said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. "We're lifting the basic skills of young kids," said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, "but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy."
But Margaret Spellings, Duncan's predecessor under Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law. "It's not an accident that we're seeing the most improvement where NCLB has focused most vigorously," Spellings said. "The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight - it's not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach."
Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains a question.
The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released yesterday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.
The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation's high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, and once in high school.
The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading, 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years' worth of learning, said Peggy Carr at the Education Department. 