Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 15

EDUCATION WEEK
Blacks, Hispanics See
Long-Term Progress
Narrowing of NAEP achievement gap stalls
By Erik W. Robelen
Black and Hispanic students
have posted large gains in academic
achievement since the early 1970s,
according to new federal data. Along
the way, the achievement gap with
their white peers has narrowed
in nearly all categories across the
three age levels tested as part of a
national assessment of long-term
trends that looks at test data spanning
some 40 years.
In most cases, though, the advances
in closing that gap have
largely stalled since the mid- to
late 1980s, the data, issued late last
month, indicate.
Overall, the nation’s 9-year-olds
and 13-year-olds are better off academically
today than they were
in 1971 in reading, and in 1973 in
math, the years when the long-term
National Assessment of Educational
Progress was first administered, the
results suggest.
For 17-year-olds, the achievement
levels are about the same when
comparing 2012 data with results
for the early 1970s in both subjects.
But even at that age level, the overall
trend line masks gains for black,
Hispanic, and white students.
“There are considerable bright
spots [in the new report], including
remarkable improvement among
black and Hispanic students, and
great strides for girls in mathematics,”
David P. Driscoll, the chairman
of the National Assessment Governing
Board, said in a press release.
The average score for 9-year-old
black students reached its highest
level in reading since students were
first tested, 206 on the NAEP scale,
which goes from zero to 500. That’s
an increase of 36 points from 1971.
The black-white gap in that category
narrowed from 44 to 23 points.
Hispanic 9-year-olds and 13-yearolds
both gained 32 points in reading
compared with the results in
1975, when data for Hispanics in
that subject was first reported separately.

The gap between Hispanic
13-year-olds and their non-Hispanic
white peers declined from 35 to 21
points in math from 1973 to 2012.
Little Gender Difference
Kati Haycock, the president of
the Education Trust, a Washingtonbased
research and advocacy group,
said the improvements for black
and Latino children “aren’t just
minor, statistically significant but
meaningless gains.”
Pointing to some of the math re-
sults, she noted: “While it might
have seemed impossible 25 years
ago for black and Latino 9-yearolds
to reach the proficiency levels
that white students then held, they
have indeed reached those levels in
math,” Ms. Haycock said.
White students also made statis-
tically significant gains in reading
and math at all three age levels
tested, when comparing the 2012
data with scores from the early
1970s, the results show. (The NAEP
study does not report results for
Asian/Pacific Islander students or
for American Indian and Alaska
Native students because of limits
on the data available, though they
are part of the national averages.)
As for gender gaps, the 2012
data show no statistical difference
between girls and boys in math
at ages 9 and 13. A small gap of 4
points on the NAEP scale still exists
for 17-year-old girls, though that
figure is half the gap it was in 1973.
‘Simpson’s Paradox’
The long-term-trend NAEP differs
from the main NAEP results, which
the U.S. Department of Education
issues more often. Three key differences
are the content assessed, the
students selected for participation,
and how the results are reported.
For example, the main NAEP provides
results for individual states
and selected urban districts, while
the long-term-trend data are solely
at the national level.
Brett Houston, a member of the
NAEP governing board and the principal
of Shawnee Middle School in
Shawnee, Okla., said in a prepared
statement that he was alarmed that
achievement for 17-year-olds was
“stagnant” since the early 1970s.
But some experts caution that the
national average obscures gains by
individual subgroups.
“That’s a statistical phenomenon
called Simpson’s Paradox,” Tom
Loveless, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, a Washington
think tank, said in an email.
“Even though blacks, whites, and
Hispanics have all made gains, the
overall average has remained flat.
“Why? Because two of the groups
(blacks and Hispanics) are lowerscoring,
and even with their improved
scores, as they become a
larger proportion of the overall
population, their scores bring the
average down.”
White 17-year-olds saw the small-
est gains since the early 1970s,
climbing just 4 points in math and
in reading.
Meanwhile, although the NAEP
report highlights the narrowing
of achievement gaps for black and
Hispanic students relative to their
non-Hispanic white peers since the
testing program began, that doesn’t
tell the whole story.
In most cases, the gaps today are
no smaller than they were more
than two decades ago, the data
show. In fact, they’re sometimes
larger, though not by amounts
deemed statistically significant.
For example, the black-white
reading gap for 13-year-olds
reached its narrowest point in
1988, at 18 points, compared with
23 points in 2012. In math, the
black-white gap for 9-year-olds was
25 points in 1986, the same figure
as for 2012.
Robert Rothman, a senior fellow
at the Alliance for Excellent Education,
a Washington research and advocacy
group, said those data pose a
puzzle for education experts.
“Why did the gap narrrow so
much between the early ’70s and
late ’80s, and why hasn’t it narrowed
since then?” he said.
The achievement gaps have
shown little movement since 2008,
when the long-term exams were
last administered. No statistically
significant changes occurred in the
black-white achievement gap across
all three age ranges in both reading
and math. For Hispanic students,
the only instance of a statistically
significant narrowing of the gap
was seen with 13-year-olds in reading.
It closed by 5 points.
Ms. Haycock from the Education
Trust said there’s plenty of work
ahead. “[W]e aren’t yet moving fast
enough to educate the ‘minorities’
who will soon comprise a ‘new majority’
of our children nearly as well
as we educate the old majority,” she
said. “At best, students of color are
just now performing at the level of
white students a generation ago.”
n
JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
n
UPS AND DOWNS
The NAEP reading scores for both black and white
13-year-olds have risen in the past four decades. The
data also show ebbs and flows in the achievement gap
between the two races.
500
280
270
260
250
240
230
220
210
200
0
Original assessment format
Revised assessment format
* Significantly different from 2012
SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics
White
261*
39*
222*
Black
1971
1980
1988
1996
2008
2012
264*
32*
233*
261*
18
243
234*
266*
32*
247
247
268
21
270
23
SCORE
GAP
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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