A Quick Look at How Our Kids Are Doing

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I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this before in one form or another, and I’m not sure what prompted me to do it again, but every once in a while I feel the urge to present some raw data about how our kids are doing in school. The charts below are taken directly from the most recent NAEP report card, generally viewed as the “gold standard” among measures of student achievement. Here are the results among eighth-graders over the past 20 years in reading:

Overall scores are up.
White scores are up.
Black scores are up.
Hispanic scores are up.

And for math:

Overall scores are way up.
White scores are way up.
Black scores are way up.
Hispanic scores are way up.

Obviously it would be nice to be doing even better. It would be nice if black and Hispanic scores were catching up faster. We still have plenty of lousy schools that we should be working hard to improve. And achievement results among twelfth-graders are more ambiguous. School reform is an important topic and worth spending a lot of time on.

Still, keep these basic results in the back of your minds. Contrary to widespread opinion, our children are doing better today than they were 20 years ago. We’re making progress, not falling ever further behind.