USA Today – Greg Toppo
“We’ve become accustomed to bad news about our kids’ reading and math skills — decades of bleak results from standardized tests now seem almost routine. But what if we scratched beneath the surface and figured out just how many students can actually read and do math proficiently? A new report attempts to paint that picture. Researchers at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank, gathered demographic data about the current crop of students in 21 metropolitan areas and combined it with recent results on a federally administered test of math and reading skills. The results, out today, are sobering. If all of Detroit’s fourth-graders took the well-respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, just 120 African-American fourth-graders across the entire city, by researchers’ estimates, would score “proficient” or above in math.”(more)