Student Test Scores Continue to Rise, Just As They Have For the Past 40 Years

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Bob Somerby is excited. In the Washington Post this morning, Lyndsey Layton reports on the results of the latest NAEP test scores, and she forthrightly says that they “paint a picture of steady student achievement that contradicts the popular notion that U.S. educational progress has stalled.” Bob comments:

In the highlighted passages, the Washington Post has finally confessed. At long last, it is reporting the basic story that it has obscured for so long:

The nation’s students are doing better in reading and math! NAEP data “paint a picture of steady student achievement that contradicts the popular notion that U.S. educational progress has stalled.”

Let’s say that again: The actual data contradict the popular notion that educational progress has stalled.

Yep. Test scores haven’t been declining. Our international rankings haven’t been dropping. They just haven’t. They’ve been rising. Rising for whites, rising for blacks, and rising for Latinos. Just plain rising. 

This doesn’t mean everything is peachy; it doesn’t mean there aren’t pockets of unconscionably poor achievement; and it doesn’t mean we’re spending our educational dollars wisely. We can still argue about all that stuff, just as we can argue about charter schools, direct instruction, concentrated poverty, and much more. But the backdrop for those arguments is simple: test scores have been going up for the past four decades, and that rise has continued over the past decade. Not always steadily, but nonetheless going in the right direction. I’ll even add my usual caveat for the pessimists in the audience: test scores for 17-year-olds have been mostly flat, so we still need to figure out how to keep rising test scores from washing out in later years.

Still: test scores are up! They’ve been going up for a long time! The basic charts are below. If you want to play around with the data for yourself, just click here.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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