Political leaders are fond of saying the United States is in an education crisis.
The U.S. is often shown to be losing ground internationally. We revisit a Sputnik moment every time international test scores are released, and some of the Sturm und Drang over our decline is a response to America’s middling ranking among other wealthy countries. However, the U.S. has historically underperformed on such cross-national comparisons. We came in 11 out of 12 on the first international assessment of math in 1964, for instance.
“People like the simple story,” said Jack Buckley, the head of research at the College Board, who previously led the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm. “And the simple story is we’re treading water while the others are pushing ahead of us. I think [that] is the narrative of the times.”
But the truth is more complicated than the image of a U.S. education system stuck in the mire. And by one important measure, the nation’s students have been improving at a steady pace for decades.
“I don’t think there’s much evidence of decline, is the bottom line,” said Dan Goldhaber, a prominent education scholar and director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. “And I would characterize it as a not very nuanced assessment.”
Since the Nixon administration, federal education administrators every few years have issued the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s long-term trend assessments, part of a government project called the Nation’s Report Card. It captures how well a representative sample of U.S. students can answer a range of rigorous questions in mathematics and reading. Between 1973 and 2012, the average student score in reading increased by 13 points for 9-year-olds, eight points for 13-year-olds and remained stalled among 17-year-olds. In math, the gains since the 1970s were even higher for 9- and 13-year-olds but also remained virtually flat among 17-year-olds.
Slight gains on a 500-point scale, right? But the data is telling you to look deeper. Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that black and Hispanic students have made tremendous gains in math and reading on the nation’s gold standard for measuring these skills.1
While the overall math averages for 9-year-olds grew by 25 points between 1978 and 2012, average scores among black and Hispanic students increased by 34 and 31 points, respectively.
Among 13-year-olds, math scores for white students increased by 21 points, while results for blacks and Hispanics increased by 34 points and 33 points, respectively. Overall, 13-year-olds improved by 26 points in math.
Seventeen-year-olds, many of whom are one year away from enrolling in college, nudged upward by six points overall between 1978 and 2012 on the math portion of NAEP, but scores for black and Hispanic students increased by 20 and 18 points, respectively.
Overall, scores for 9-year-olds taking the reading assessment grew by 11 points between 1975 and 2012; the scores for black and Hispanic students each rose by 25 points in that same period.
While scores for all 13-year-olds and white students increased by less than 10 points in reading, scores for blacks and Hispanics grew by 21 and 17 points, respectively.
Among 17-year-olds, reading scores for the overall tested population and white students grew by no more than two points between 1975 and 2012; scores for both black and Hispanic students grew by more than 20 points.
So, why haven’t minority students’ numbers boosted the overall average? There are two main reasons: Black and Hispanic students have grown as a share of all students in the U.S., yet despite the improvements of these groups, their scores still are lower than those of white students. That means the average doesn’t represent the considerable student growth at play.
In statistics, this phenomenon is called Simpson’s paradox.
“The minority students tend to do worse on the NAEP test, and they’re growing as a proportion of the population,” said Goldhaber, who also studies education issues at the University of Washington Bothell. “So, the fact that they are growing and have test scores that are below the average of white students, they’re going to drag the overall average down, even if their average is rising over time.”
Since the early 1970s, the share of white students captured by NAEP has declined from over 80 percent of U.S. students to just over half. That trend helps explain why even in the case of 17-year-olds, a flat aggregate score over time masks improvements by white, black and Hispanic students.
Fine, we’re not in neutral rolling down a hill toward academic ruin. But are we doing well enough? That comes down to how we define progress. It’s one thing to observe certain groups improving, but it’s also clear that whites are still outperforming blacks and Hispanics, in no small part because there are serious disparities in the quality of education low-income and minority students receive compared to their peers.
“When we look at achievement gaps, it’s really important to look at how those gaps are closing. We want to see all groups getting better,” said Allison Horowitz, a policy analyst at Education Trust, a think tank. “But we want to make sure that students who are low income or of color, who are too often at the bottom of the achievement gap, we want to see them closing that gap by increasing faster than their white or affluent counterparts.”
“This question gets raised in the labor market in terms of wages all the time,” Goldhaber said. “Do you care about whether your wage is going up year over year, or do you care where you stand relative to other people? And I think it’s not an either/or: We care about both. And the degree to which somebody cares about one versus the other depends on the person.”
Although NAEP shows that minority students are improving, the story is more mixed along socioeconomic lines. Stanford researcher Sean Reardon has argued that while the U.S. has made strides in closing the racial achievement gap, the economic gap between rich and poor students has widened. He looked at not only comprehensive test scores, but also other measures of academic success, such as entry into competitive universities and earning a college degree.
Read the full story in the FiveThirtyEightLife.
Sean Reardon is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is a member of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
