Op-Ed: Good News in Public Education
Feature Story by William L. Taylor - 7/25/2005
William L. Taylor is chair of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights and vice chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.Good news for public education and children of color arrived last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP reports are eagerly awaited in the education community because the organization is highly regarded and viewed by many as "the gold standard," providing an objective yardstick to measure progress in learning across the country.
On July 14, NAEP released a report on the sample of some 28,000 students who were assessed in 2004.
The best news concerned 9-year old African American students in the third grade. They reached an all-time high in their scores on reading and mathematics tests. The gains narrowed the achievement gap between African American and white 9-year old students to an all-time low.
To put the progress in perspective, it is useful to know that in 1971, the median score for African Americans was 170; in 2004 it was 200. In 1981, when the first major NAEP report was issued, the score for African American 9-year olds was 189. This represented major progress over a ten-year period and, since the improvement for whites was relatively negligible, resulted in a significant narrowing of the racial gap.
Interestingly, in the 1970s, the greatest of these gains were made by 9-year old black students in the Southeast region of the country. While NAEP itself offered no analysis of the reasons for the progress, many observers (including this author) noted that, beginning in 1971, court-ordered desegregation took place throughout the region. That factor, along with the establishment of the Head Start program and enactment in 1965 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), undoubtedly contributed to the gains that these African American students were making.
Then, in the late 1980s, progress stopped and the nation began a period of stagnation that lasted through most of the 90s. But from 1999 to 2004, there was another growth spurt, with a 14-point improvement in reading for African American students and a 13-point gain in math. Similarly, Hispanic 9-year olds gained 12 points in reading and 17 points in math.
Predictably, the Bush administration was quick to credit the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for much of the progress. There may be more than a grain of truth to the administration's claim. But Darvin Winnick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the test, noted that many of the reform efforts were initiated by states during the Clinton administration. He might have added that Clinton's Improving America's Schools Act was enacted in 1994 and put in place many of the school improvement and accountability provisions of NCLB.
NCLB strengthened the Clinton program in two significant ways: first, it required schools for the first time to show progress for low-income and minority students, and second, its enactment was accompanied by the largest increases in federal education funding in the 40-year history of the ESEA.
The news for 13 year-old African Americans and Hispanics was positive but not as dramatic as for 9 year-olds. At the high school level, NAEP reports, "reading and math scores have remained relatively flat since the 1970s."
State-by-state scores will be available later this year and should provide material for examining possible links between particular initiatives and results. Certainly there will be calls for reform at the high school level--an issue that has been given very little attention by NCLB and its predecessors.
While supporters of reform should be careful to analyze the data before making positive links to NCLB, the law's vociferous detractors have been given something to think about too. FairTest replied to the NAEP report by lashing out at some high school exit exams as reflecting "test pollution," but stopped short of attacking the NAEP assessment. (NAEP is sometimes criticized by others as having low scores because it is not a high-stakes assessment). Other groups critical of NCLB have been conspicuous by their silence.
It may be time for all of us to celebrate this genuinely good news, take a deep breath, and see what we can learn that will inform future efforts.
