Fourth- and eighth-grade students in Dallas and Fort Worth continue to struggle on national tests designed to give a common measure of student achievement across the country.
Math and reading results for the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called “the nation’s report card,” were released on Wednesday.
And Dallas and Fort Worth fared poorly — not only when compared to national averages, but against other urban districts as well.
NAEP scores are considered noteworthy because they offer a standardized 30-year look at student performance across America.
The tests are often used as a barometer for state-to-state and national performance, not local districts. But Dallas and Fort Worth are among 27 school systems — including Houston and Austin — participating in a special project where more students take the tests, offering a representative sample of performance within those districts.
In DISD, for example, 4,500 students took part in NAEP at 100 of the district’s campuses.
The results from Dallas and Fort Worth ISDs weren’t good, particularly among eighth-graders.
Among the 27 urban districts that took part in the special project, Dallas and Fort Worth joined Los Angeles Unified School District as the only three school systems which suffered statistically significant declines in both eighth-grade reading and math.
Scores in DISD and FWISD both declined by four points in eighth-grade math when compared to 2017 test scores. In eighth-grade reading — an area of weakness for nearly all of the project’s participants — Dallas’ scores dropped four points, and Fort Worth’s five.
Only one school system — the District of Columbia Public Schools — showed a significant increase in eighth-grade reading, with scores in the remaining 26 districts either stagnant or sliding.
Performance among fourth-graders in Dallas and Fort Worth was largely flat in the two subjects.
DISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa said he wasn’t surprised by the results.
The district has acknowledged its struggles in middle-school grades, Hinojosa said, prompting DISD to launch a new initiative aimed at increasing performance among sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.
The effort, which started this school year, uses strategic staffing, better instructional support, extended learning and more resources to try to boost outcomes at 24 of the district’s middle schools.
“This is our weak spot — achieving in the middle,” Hinojosa said. “We don’t need to make excuses about it; we just need to improve.”
While Hinojosa said he didn’t have a problem with the data, he did have a problem with how it was reported. Even among the 27 urban school systems, DISD had a much higher percentage of high-poverty students and English-Language learners than most of the others, he said.
“When you break it down for the level of poverty, we do pretty well,” Hinojosa said. “But NAEP just puts scores out in larger comparisons, without disaggregating.”
That lack of disaggregation “gives us pause to participate” in the special project, Hinojosa said. “It does do us a disservice when these broad generalizations are made, without closer comparisons.”
So how could DISD be improving as a district — according to the Texas Education Agency — but not improving on these types of standardized tests?
There could be significant differences between what NAEP is testing and the state’s own assessments, said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of Great City Schools.
If Texas’ own set of academic standards misses out on skills and concepts that NAEP measures, scores could be divergent. The National Center for Education Statistics — which administers the NAEP — pointed out this gap in August, when it published a study showing that Texas had some of the lowest “proficient” standards of any state in the country.
Even so, Casserly said in a district press release that “Dallas continues to be one of the shining stars across the country in terms of overall academic improvement and a district that other big cities look to for lessons.”
Nationally, the results for the 300,000 fourth-graders and 291,000 eighth-graders who took the tests were not promising. While math scores stayed largely flat, reading scores dropped significantly, particularly among eighth-graders.
When compared to 2017 results, 31 states suffered a statistically significant drop in their average eighth-grade reading score — with only the District of Columbia noting a significant gain. Texas saw a four-point drop in eighth-grade reading.
Among fourth-graders, 17 states had significant declines in reading scores, with only Mississippi recording a gain. Texas scores stayed flat.
Perhaps more alarming than the nation’s performance was the results for students who struggled on the NAEP — where interventions and policy changes are typically focused.
While reading performance barely dipped for the highest-performing eighth-graders —- with those in the 90th percentile dropping a single point —- students at the 10th and 25th percentiles did significantly worse than two years ago, dipping six and five points respectively.
Over the past three decades, American students have made big gains in math and small gains in reading. But those trends have flattened out since 2009.
“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest-performing students are doing worse,” said Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — a long-time advocate for expanding school choice — called the results “devastating.”
“This must be America’s wake-up call,” DeVos said in a statement. “We cannot abide these poor results any longer. We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”
