Washington’s black students scored well below white classmates in the state, and the achievement gap for Washington’s black eighth-graders was significantly wider than the national average for black eighth-graders.
Advertisement
Daniel Grill/Getty Images Scores for eighth graders increased slightly in both math and reading, with 27% proficiency in reading and 27% proficiency in math – each up 2% from 2013.
Ybarra was traveling out-of-state Wednesday, and unavailable for an interview, an SDE spokesman said.
Idaho’s fourth-grade math scores were the worst since 2003, while eighth-grade math scores were the lowest since 2007, according to NAEP.
In fourth grade, 41 percent of Maine students taking the 2015 test scored proficient or better, which is down from 47 percent two years ago.
NAEP testing is administered every two years in math and reading to a statistical sampling of fourth and eighth graders. In eighth grade math, the state ranked 37, up from 43 in 2013, and the state jumped four spots from 2013 to 30 in eighth grade reading. But the ratio of eighth-graders having the hardest time in school has changed little over time.
“You can’t discount the socioeconomic status of the community, school or family” when evaluating performance on tests like these, Kilby-Chesley said. But in addition to math dropping this year, reading appeared to stall. So NAEP has developed what it calls a “NAEP scale equivalent score”, which is the point on the NAEP metric at which the state’s proficiency level is set for an equivalent percentage of students. A national test given every two years released the report card this morning.
However, Carr emphasized that scores are still much higher than they were in the 1990s. “And that is huge news for us”. Mississippi and Louisiana were also higher, both states up six points.
While average mathematics scores for fourth graders declined nationwide, Mississippi was one of the only jurisdictions where fourth graders improved in mathematics and reading between 2013 and 2015.
“We are working to raise academic standards, use data from a new state assessment, and develop a system for providing professional development to our educators”, Villar said in a statement.
The achievement gap between certain students and others remains a point of contention for a few.
And only a fifth of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch scored proficient or above on the eighth-grade reading math test compared with half of youngsters living in higher-income households. Nationally, scores for that age group trended downward in both subjects.
Advertisement
In grade 4, most subgroups performed better than their national peers scoring at or aboveBasic.
