Both white and black students raised their math and reading achievement levels from 1992 to 2007, according to a new federal report, but New York was not among the states that narrowed the achievement gap between the races. In fact, few states narrowed their black-white test gaps in either grade or subject, despite the long years of No Child Left Behind.
“Scores have been increasing for both black and white students for the most part, but we do not see a lot of progress in closing the achievement gap,” Stuart Kerachsky, Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters at the National Press Club on July 14.
In fourth-grade math, 15 states narrowed the gap, including many of the largest — California, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts and and Texas. But that was the highpoint. In eighth-grade math only four states closed that gap from 1990 to 2007; just three states narrowed the gap in fourth-grade reading; and no states at all showed any statistically significant improvement in the eighth-grade reading gap over the last two decades.
NCES used results from the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) that have already been published to do the new analysis. In the report, New York State does show slightly narrower gaps between white and black test scores in math and in fourth-grade reading since the early 1990s, but NCES did not find any of New York’s gains statistically significant. There was no real evidence of improvement.
Despite Chancellor Klein’s memorable claim a year ago that statistical significance was just a game, NCES significance tests are essential to analyzing and interpreting the changes in scores. NAEP tests are given to samples of students, and the results are subject to both sampling and measurement error unless they are subjected to significance tests. What the report shows is no progress in New York State in closing the black-white gap.
Ideally, NCES said, it wants to see both white and black achievement go up with blacks increasing at a faster pace. However, there were instances where gaps narrowed when white student performance stayed flat while black performance rose, or even when both groups declined but whites went down more. This was especially evident in eighth-grade reading.
“The stark fact is the gaps in school and life experiences that mirror gaps in school achievement are still with us like an uninvited guest who comes early and stays late,” said Paul Barton of the Education Commission for the States at this morning’s press conference. Commenter Hugh Price, a Brookings Fellow and Princeton professor, talked about generations of poverty and the need for rebuilding communities as well as schools.
No one said it, but NCLB was the elephant in the room. From 2002 to 2007, the law designed to disaggregate results and shine a harsh light on performance gaps did not succeed in remedying them. It may be time to actually support effective interventions instead of spending all the money to assign blame.