USAT: Grades rise, but reading skills fall, data suggest

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USA TODAY

Grades rise, but reading skills fall, data suggest
Updated 2/22/2007 10:28 PM ET
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — High school seniors are taking more challenging classes and earning higher grades than ever, but their reading skills have actually worsened since 1992, data released Thursday by the U.S. Education Department suggest.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the results show that "we must act now to increase rigor in our high schools." The No Child Left Behind law, up for reauthorization this year, currently applies only minimally to high schools.

The report brought mixed — and contradictory — results:

A record 68% of the class of 2005 completed at least a standard curriculum with four years of English and three each of math, science and social studies. That's a huge jump from 1990, when only 40% did the same, according to the study of 26,000 public- and private-school transcripts.
In 2005, 51% of students were doing college-preparatory work, up from 31% in 1990. And 10% were earning college credit, up from 5% in 1990.

•The average high school senior doesn't read as well as those in 1992, the first year the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was given to 12th-graders. In 2005, 35% of seniors scored "proficient" or "advanced," down from 40% in 1992.

Reading at a "proficient" level means students can make critical judgments — for instance, describing how two editorials argue different viewpoints. "Basic" means students can read and retrieve information from a document and recognize a sequence of plot elements.

The government has no comparable long-term data on math scores since it changed the test in 2005. But the 2005 scores show that, overall, 12th-graders' skills are basic at best.

"Clearly we need to look at some major changes in the way schools are organized and how teaching is delivered," Massachusetts Education Commissioner David Driscoll said.

The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless, who researches the NAEP and course content, said that the reading results "should really be an area of concern" — and that perhaps even the brightest students don't read as much as they used to.

Critics have long said the NAEP is a poor measure of how well 12th-graders do, and the new data could give them ammunition: Even students whose transcripts show they took calculus score only, on average, "proficient" in math.

Loveless noted that the test includes no calculus, which forces advanced students to do math work they haven't done in three or four years.

Education researcher Gerald Bracey said 12th-graders take the NAEP in the last semester of their high school careers, and they have no real incentive to do well. Poor results are "senior slump writ large," he said.



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