The nation’s schoolchildren have made little or no progress in reading proficiency in recent years, according to results released Wednesday from the largest nationwide reading test. The scores continue a 17-year trend of sluggish achievement in reading that contrasts with substantial gains in mathematics during roughly the same period.
“The nation has done a really good job improving math skills,” said Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and a former official at the Education Department, which oversees the test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “In contrast, we have made only marginal improvements in reading.”
Why math scores have improved so much faster than reading scores is much debated; the federal officials who produce the test say it is intended to identify changes in student achievement over time, not to identify causes.
In seeking to explain the lagging reading scores, some experts point to declines in the amount of reading children do for pleasure as they devote more free time to surfing the Internet, texting on cellphones or watching television. Others blame undemanding curriculums.
For example, Susan Pimentel, an expert on English and reading standards who is a member of the governing board that oversees the test, said that American schools were fairly efficient at teaching basic reading skills in the early grades, but that as students matured they need to be consistently challenged to broaden those skills by reading not only complex literature but also sophisticated nonfiction in subjects like history and science.
“We’re not asking them to read nearly enough,” Ms. Pimentel said.
One group of students, though, has made significant gains in reading over the last decade: the nation’s worst readers. The average scores of fourth graders in the bottom 10 percent for reading increased by 16 points from 2000 to 2009. In contrast, the average scores of the nation’s best fourth-grade readers, those in the top 10 percent, rose by only 2 points during the same period.
“All the progress in reading is being made at the bottom,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Our worst readers are getting better, but our best readers are staying about the same.”
Sheila W. Valencia, an education professor at the University of Washington, said the Bush administration’s $1-billion-a-year reading initiative, Reading First, focused instruction in thousands of public schools on building lower-level reading skills.
“We have evidence that Reading First helped young students increase their ability to read words, but not their capacity for comprehension, and the national assessment especially measures reading comprehension,” Professor Valencia said. “So that’s one hypothesis for why scores have stayed pretty constant.”
The reading test, mandated by Congress, was given to 338,000 fourth- and eighth-grade students last spring. Results of the math test, also administered last spring, were released in October.
On average, eighth graders scored 264 on a 500-point scale in reading, compared with 263 in 2007, when the test was last given. Fourth graders scored 221 on the 2009 test, the same average as two years earlier.
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