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Nationally, scores for reading in fourth and eighth grades dropped from 2017 to 2019. Declines were recorded among students with the highest scores and among those with the lowest scores. In math, there was a small improvement among fourth-graders but a small drop in grade eight, driven by declines among lower-performing students.
The national results, reported on a 500-point scale, were based on testing of about 300,000 fourth-graders and 290,600 eighth-graders. The changes since 2017 were sometimes a shift of a single point, a small but statistically significant change. Fourth-graders scored an average of 240 points on their math test, and eighth-graders earned an average of 281 points on the exam. In reading, fourth-graders earned an average of 219 points and eighth-graders scored 262 points.
NAEP, often referred to as the “nation’s report card,” is a closely watched exam because it assesses the performance of children from all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds in urban, suburban and rural communities. The government first administered a version of the exam in 1990, and it tests fourth- and eighth-graders in math and reading every other year.
This year, the District and Mississippi were the only jurisdictions to improve on three of the four metrics evaluated. And when compared with the 50 states, the District made the largest gains in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math over the three decades since the test was first administered.
