The Nation???s Report Card 2011: Reading and Mathematics

Sports fans have the NFL draft. Politicos relish the presidential election. And on Tuesday, education wonks enjoyed their favorite day: the release of the nation’s report card, or NAEP. The assessment found modest gains in fourth-grade math and in both reading and math at the eighth-grade level since the last round of testing in 2009. (Fourth-grade reading scores have been flat since 2007.) Two days after the release, much of the relevant inference and conjecture that can be bled from the NAEP data stone already has been: Kevin Carey of Ed Sector used the longitudinal data to articulate that we can move the needle on student performance—especially for math. (In the last twenty years, the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring below the basic level in math fell from 50 percent to just 18 percent.) Mike Petrilli speculated that the statistically significant uptick in eighth-grade reading could be attributed to the efficacy of Reading First (prior to its defunding). Politics K-12 dissected results of Race to the Top winning states (especially Hawaii, the only state to see gains in all four categories). And Matt Ladner ranked states on how well they’re teaching low-income, minority, and special-needs students. Go ahead and join in the fun; play with the user-friendly NAEP data explorer here.