Since 1990s, U.S. Students’ Math Has Sharpened, but Reading Lags

By SAM DILLON

Published: November 1, 2011

Elementary and middle school students have improved greatly in math, but their reading skills have stagnated over the last two decades, federal officials said on Tuesday.

The officials, who oversee the largest federal standardized testing program, used the release of scores from nationwide math and reading exams to highlight the contrasting long-term trends.

“We’ve made major gains in math over two decades, but, in reading, frankly, we haven’t — there’ve been only modest improvements,” said David Driscoll, the chairman of the governing board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Department of Education’s standardized testing program.

Mr. Driscoll and other officials and experts put forward several hypotheses to explain the trends. Children learn most of their math in school, and even though math instruction in the United States in general lags behind that in some high-performing countries, the experts said, it has improved over the past two decades. Reading achievement, in contrast, reflects not only the quality of reading instruction in school classrooms, they said, but also factors like whether parents read to children and how much time students read on their own outside school. And many children in the United States are spending less time reading on their own.

  The scores on the latest federal math and reading tests, administered this year to pupils in the fourth and eighth grades nationwide, showed only minor changes. In math, the average fourth-grade score was 241 on a scale of 500, up from 240 in 2009, when the last federal math and reading results were released.

The average eighth-grade math score on the latest test was 284, up from 283 two years ago. In reading, the average eighth-grade score this year was 265, compared with 264 in 2009. Average fourth-grade reading scores were unchanged from 2009, at 221.

  “Nothing very startling or notable,” Mr. Driscoll said of the changes in this year’s scores.

  It has been 20 years since Congressionally mandated changes in the federal testing program took effect, prompting officials this year to examine the long-term results more closely than usual, officials said.

  In 1990, 13 percent of fourth graders scored at the proficient level in math; this year, 40 percent were proficient, a gain of 27 percentage points.

  Reading performance, in contrast, has seen much smaller improvements. In 1992, 29 percent of fourth-grade students were proficient in reading; this year, 34 percent scored at the proficient level, a gain of five percentage points.

   “I’m disappointed but not surprised by these results,” said Sharon Darling, founder of the National Center for Family Literacy, a group based in Kentucky that works to help parents support their children’s educational efforts at home.  “Children spend five times as much time outside the classroom as they do in school, and our country has 30 million parents or caregivers who are not good readers themselves, so they pass illiteracy down to their children.”

   New York’s results on the federal tests have mirrored the national trends, with only marginal reading improvement over the years, compared with much faster gains in math. In 1992, for instance, 22 percent of fourth-grade students in New York were proficient in reading. This year, 26 percent were, a gain of four percentage points.

  In math, 16 percent of  the state’s fourth graders were proficient in 1992; this year 30 percent were, a gain of 14 percentage points.

But from 2009 to 2011, New York was the only state in the nation where fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in math. Until this year, New York fourth graders had done better than the nation as a whole on the math test. This year, for the first time since 1992, New York fourth graders fared worse than the nation as a whole. The state has made progress, however, in closing the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic fourth graders in math since 1992.