Can Johnny read yet?
The Christian Science Monitor
By Marjorie Coeyman
June 24, 2003
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Once again US students have taken a reading test, and once again the results of that test are being called "mixed," with some pundits identifying them as proof of failure, and others insisting they demonstrate limited progress.
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But for a nation that has been struggling for almost two decades now to raise its academic achievement levels, it's almost impossible not to link test scores to a single, compelling question: Are the efforts being made to reform US schools doing any good?
What the numbers revealed was that the nation's fourth-graders have made some progress in reading throughout the 1990s, while 12th-graders are actually doing worse. At the eighth-grade level, the lowest performing students made gains since 1998, when the test was last administered. Overall, however, eighth-grade scores remained fairly stagnant.
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The NAEP tests, sometimes called "the nation's report card," are viewed as important because they are one of the few vehicles offering a broad, national perspective on progress.
They will become a far more vital part of the national dialogue on education, however, as a result of the 2002 No Child Left Behind federal education act. Starting in 2003, all 50 states will be required to participate in NAEP exams and to make NAEP scores available. NAEP assessments in math and reading will be done every two years thereafter.
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The belief that there is a reading crisis in the US seems fairly entrenched in public consciousness today, and many educators would argue that it should be. There is less consensus, however, as to what is causing such a crisis and what its cure should be.
Some educators are disappointed that more attention is not paid to the extensive background research released with the NAEP test results.
NAEP researchers also collect information on students that regularly demonstrates the importance of the home environment. Consistently, students are seen to perform better if they have books at home, are read to by their parents, and watch less TV.
The fact that students in higher grades show less progress may also be further proof that socioeconomic conditions play a major role in student reading skills. "The impact of poverty shows up more and more in upper grades," says Paul Reville, lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass.
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