Last week, The Washington Post reported on efforts in Virginia to increase the cut scores on the Standards of Learning assessments. “The goal,” the paper reported, “is to align state exam standards with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal test used to measure career readiness and student achievement.” The effort is seeing some pushback, as the article goes on to describe.
To provide some context, this week we look at the shares of students in each state considered to be below NAEP Basic on the 2024 4th grade reading assessment. Nationally, about 4 in 10 (41%) are below Basic. (NB: Because state-level data for NAEP reflects public school students only, this analysis looks at NAEP “National public” data rather than NAEP “National” data to facilitate the state comparison.)
Across all the states, only two had fewer than a third of their students who were below NAEP Basic (Massachusetts and Wyoming). Some 21 states had between a third and 39% considered below NAEP Basic. The remaining 27 states had at least 40% of their fourth graders considered below NAEP Basic. (NB: This analysis excludes the District of Columbia.)
Looking more closely at those 27 states, 19 had between 40% and 44% considered below NAEP Basic. Another 6 had between 45% and 49% considered below NAEP Basic. Two (Alaska and New Mexico) had more than 50% of their fourth graders below NAEP Basic.
Virginia was one of the 19 states with between 40% and 44% of their fourth graders below Basic in reading (42%). Thirty-two states had a smaller share of their students who were considered below Basic than Virginia.
For more on NAEP, see David’s recent column for Roll Call, “We are becoming the world’s D student, test results suggest”, looking at the latest NAEP data for 12th grade students.
