NJ Education Report

The Center on Education Policy has a new report out that charts trends in achievement gaps from 2002-2009 nationally and state by state. Data is based on state assessments and NAEP scores. Here are the four bullet points from the Executive Summary:

• Achievement gaps are large and persistent.

• Every major student group has made gains since 2002 on state readingand math tests. But even when achievement has increased for all groups, gaps have not always narrowed.

• For most student groups, gaps on state tests have often narrowed since2002. Gap trends vary, however, based on the student group and indicator of achievement examined.

• Although gaps have narrowed more rapidly for some groups than for others, at the current rates of progress it would take many years to close most gaps.

For New Jersey’s profile, trends in the achievement gaps were unavailable for 4th and 8th graders; because of our test changes, there’s not enough data to draw comparisons.

Eleventh graders in NJ showed a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for math, as increases for white kids were smaller than increases for other subgroups. While white students increased scores by .5, African-American scores went up 1.0, Latino scores went up 1.6, and low-income went up 2.6 from 2002-2009.

Reading scores for 11th graders showed improvements for Latino and low-income students: white students increased scores by .4, Latinos by 1.1, and low-income by 1.6. However, African-American students increased reading scores by only .1, less than that of all other cohorts.