Is the American education system beginning to deteriorate?
I don’t like to be alarmist or give too much weight to a test result, but the release of the 2016 reading test results around the world last week is now the third major point of proof that something is wrong. The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) — a test of reading comprehension given to fourth-grade students in 58 countries and regions around the world — showed that US performance is declining in both absolute and relative terms. U.S. fourth-graders had worse reading skills on average than five years earlier, in 2011, with scores down seven points on a 1,000-point scale. At the same time, other countries have gotten ahead of us. The combination moved the United States from 6th to 15th place in this international ranking. (The US Department of Education considers the 2016 score a statistical tie for 13th place because it was so close to those of the three countries ranked immediately ahead of it. See chart opposite.)
This follows two other disappointing test results which had largely highlighted problems with math skills. Fourth- and eighth-grade students showed declines in the math section of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Another international test, the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), showed a consecutive deterioration in math performance among 15-year-old Americans in 2012 and 2015. Reading scores had remained stable.
Reading ability in young children had not been a cause for concern. Until now.
“It looks disastrous on the face of it because we see we’re losing ground,” said Jocelyn A. Chadwick, president of the National Council of Teachers of English. “We need to dig deeper and find out exactly where this is happening: which states, which districts and which schools. The situation is not as dire across the country as the test results suggest. Some of our students can blow the top of this test. And we have to look at the places where good [teaching] practices occur.
The deterioration in the performance of low and average students led to the overall decline in test scores. The bottom tenth scores dropped 12 points, the bottom quarter dropped nine points, and the middle students dropped seven points. Meanwhile, the scores of the top performers were stable, statistically unchanged.
Chadwick said rising poverty and the erosion of the middle class, especially since the 2008 recession, are making it more difficult to teach reading. “Middle-class parents paying attention to homework or asking how their child’s day was, those parents now maybe working two jobs, or there’s a problem with health care,” said said Chadwick. Additionally, she pointed to the growing number of extremely poor students who must learn to read while facing hunger, homelessness and other upheavals at home.
So many things may have affected student performance over the five-year period between 2011 and 2016 that it is impossible to know what the main causes of deterioration are. In addition to an increase in the number of poor students, funding for schools has decreased, common core standards have been introduced, the use of educational software has increased and, in many schools, the time spent preparing testing has increased (which often impairs learning) .
NAEP, the national exam given every two years, shows a different picture for fourth grade reading. During roughly the same period from 2011 to 2015, fourth-grade reading scores rose slightly, appearing to contradict the international test released last week. But the top performers drove those gains, and the bottom performers didn’t improve at all. For example, students at the top (90th percentile) gained 2 points. Students at the 10th percentile did not budge, remaining well below the “basic level”, unable to make simple inferences or interpret the meaning of words. No matter which test you value most, there is a growing gap between the highest and lowest performing fourth graders. On any test, the lowest performers are falling further and further behind.
One way to reconcile the contradiction between PIRLS and NAEP is to take a longer historical perspective. “In the short term, there are fluctuations,” said Jack Buckley, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “But if you look back to 2001, the two trends are the same; we are flat. We don’t make much progress in reading in fourth grade.
Of course, when you look at that longer time horizon of 15 years, there is also no deterioration to worry about. Just a distinct lack of progress. “I don’t celebrate stagnation. Don’t get me wrong,” said Buckley, now senior vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research corporation. “You could say, given all the challenges schools are facing, it’s remarkable that we’ve been able to stay stable.”
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