As we mentioned in our blog on Monday, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released this week, and the unsurprising takeaway is that Arkansas’ scores declined. The declines seen in Arkansas’ scores generally track with those seen nationally. The NAEP tests are given to a representative sample of students in each state in the nation, so it acts as a standard measure of student performance across states and time.
What is interesting to consider, however, is that unlike in most other states, schools in Arkansas were open for in-person learning throughout the 2020-21 school year. Although there were short-term closures of schools throughout the year, and some students elected to attend school fully virtually or in a hybrid model, the majority of Arkansas students attended school in-person full time.
We presented an overview of NAEP performance since 2003, in Monday’s blog. Today we dig deeper into differences in Arkansas’ NAEP scores for student racial/ethnic groups and those who are facing economic disadvantages outside of school. You can get all the details in the policy brief, but here are the key findings by grade level.
4th Grade Findings:
- Performance gaps between Black students and white students INCREASED in both math and reading due to relatively greater declines from 2019 scores for Black students.
- Performance gaps between Hispanic students and white students INCREASED in both math and reading due to relatively greater declines from 2019 scores for Hispanic students.
- Performance gaps between between economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers remained the SAME in math, but INCREASED in reading due to relatively greater declines from 2019 scores for students facing economic disadvantages.
8th Grade Findings
- Performance gaps between Black students and white students DECREASED in both math and reading due to relatively greater declines from 2019 scores for white students.
- Performance gaps between Hispanic students and white students remained the SAME in both math and reading.
- Performance gaps between between economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers DECREASED in both math and reading due to relatively greater declines from 2019 scores for more economically advantaged students.
Here at OEP, we think it is interesting that in 4th grade, traditionally lower-performing student groups evidenced greater declines in 2002 than traditionally higher-performing student groups while the opposite trend is present in 8th grade, with traditionally higher-performing student groups evidencing greater declines in 2002 than traditionally lower-performing student groups.
It is difficult to determine the underlying cause of these inconsistent results in groups differences after COVID. What we can determine though, it that students in Arkansas are performing at lower levels on the NAEP than we have seen since 2003. Given that we have had persistent performance gaps, a general decline in NAEP performance well before the 2022 scores, and are trailing our bordering states in 4th grade math, the clear message is that educators and policymakers need to focus on identifying practices that will ways to grow our students’ learning faster. If we don’t- the next 20 years of student achievement are going to look just like the last 20 years.
You can see the schools in the state that are growing their students’ learning faster than typical when we release the 2022 OEP awards – coming soon!