4/29/09

Sam Dillon

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving black and Hispanic scores, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test, administered last year, than did their counterparts decades back. But nearly four decades of scores on the same test show that their most important academic gains came not in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.” Overall, America’s education system does not seem to be making more than incremental progress either. The scores of 17-year-old students were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970′s. The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, averaged across all groups, were up modestly in reading, and considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, their progress disappeared as they got older.

The results will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other tweaks. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

“We saw stronger gains and more progress in narrowing achievement gaps before No Child took effect,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at Berkeley. “The punch that centralized accountability packs seems to be weakening. We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress: Trends in Academic Progress, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight – it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability type approach.”

She said the results were especially encouraging because of the sweeping demographic changes that have overtaken American schools during the decades since the first long-term assessment was administered. In 1971, for instance, 84 percent of the 9-year-olds who took the test were white, 14 percent were black, 2 percent were classified as “other,” and Hispanics were not even broken out as a separate category. Last year, 56 percent of 9-year-olds who took the test were white, 16 percent were black, 20 percent were Hispanic, and 7 percent were classified as “other.”

“Schools are poorer, more diverse, our work is more challenging,” Ms. Spellings said.

Freeman Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful African-American children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to redouble efforts to increase time spent with low-performing students.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap -much of the desegregation work in the 70′s and 80′s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”