The 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress breaks down results into four categories: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. Students scoring at the Proficient and Advanced levels are where they should be for their grade in school. The others aren’t.
NAEP measures many subject areas at grades four, eight, and 12. The best general indicator of these is the essential skill, reading, at eighth grade. By eighth grade students have been in school long enough that it is fair to judge the overall effectiveness of their schools by the percentage of students scoring at or above Proficient in eighth grade reading.
How are we doing, particularly for young black men, arguably the most vulnerable group? The answer: Not well at all.
The percentages of White, Black, Asian and Hispanic students scoring at or above Proficient on eighth grade reading all increased between 2011 and 2013. This is either a good thing or an indication that there is a technical problem with the test. Let’s give NAEP the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that it is a good thing.
The percentage of White students scoring at or above Proficient increased by three points, as did that for Hispanic students. The percentage of Asian students scoring at or above Proficient increased by four points. The percentage of Black students scoring at or above proficient increased by two points. That is, the gap between Black students and the others increased by between one and two points.
This is not good. Particularly not good if we look at the actual percentages. Half of all Asian students scored at or above Proficient on eighth grade reading in 2013. The percentage for White, non-Hispanic, students is 44 percent. Not as good as the Asian result, but pretty good (especially when we see that the percentage in 2011 was only 41 percent). A fifth of Hispanic students (21 percent) scored Proficient or above.
Meanwhile, just 16 percent of Black students scored Proficient or above in eighth grade reading on the 2013 NAEP. Which means, of course, that 84 percent did not. It is particularly troubling that Hispanic students are now five percentage points more likely to read at grade level in eighth grade than their Black peers. [Hispanic outcomes include those of the large middle class Cuban community in Florida and the entirely Hispanic districts along the Texas-Mexico border, where differential intra-district school funding is not an issue.]
Young black men, as we have come to expect, are failed by their schools even more spectacularly than their sisters. Twenty-one percent of female Black students score at the level of Proficient or above, a rate identical with that of Hispanic students. But just 12 percent of male Black students score Proficient or above on the NAEP eighth grade reading assessments. Those are national averages. Alabama, Mississippi and Wisconsin have been unable to break 10 percent for their male Black students (nine percent, five percent and seven percent, respectively). Everyone knows about Milwaukee, not to mention Mississippi.
What is to happen to the nearly 90 percent of male Black students on the verge of secondary school who the schools have not taught to read proficiently? Will they graduate from high school? Will they avoid incarceration? Will they find good jobs and live with their families on middle class incomes? Will their children have access to good schools? Or will the Black poverty cycle continue, pushed along by inequitable school funding, stop-and-frisk policing, mass incarceration and increasing inequality? No prizes for the obvious correct answers.
