While growing numbers of Hispanic students have changed the face of American education in the past two decades, the gap between them and their white classmates in math and reading remains as wide as it was in the 1990s, says a new federal study.
The National Center for Education Statistics report, released June 23, finds that Hispanic students have improved significantly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 1990. The mean scale scores in mathematics rose 28 points for Hispanic 4th graders and 21 points for 8th graders; in reading, the scores improved 10 points in the 4th and 8th grades from the early 1990s to 2009, with each 10-point increase equal to about one grade level of improvement.
Yet non-Hispanic white students exceeded Hispanic students’ increase in math in both the 4th and 8th grades during the same time, and while white students’ performance improved more slowly in reading, the growth was not slow enough for Hispanic students to catch up and close the gaps of more than two grade levels between the groups in both subjects.
“I think with this report coming out, people can respond in two ways,” said Raul González, the director of legislative affairs for the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic-advocacy organization. “We can say, ‘Well, we tried and we failed, so let’s not try anymore,’ or we can look at the data and say, ‘If 20 to 25 percent of your school system’s kids are not doing well, we need to do something urgent.’ ”
The report, the second in a series by NCES analyzing long-term trends for student groups on the NAEP, compares students’ average scale scores on the tests, not the percentages of students who reach each proficiency level.
The first study Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, in 2009, found narrowing achievement gaps between black and white students in 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade math, but there, too, white students retained a two-grade-level performance advantage on NAEP.
via Education Week: 20-Year Hispanic Academic Gaps Persist in Math, Reading.
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July 15, 2011 at 6:13 AM
Someone should be asking the ‘guru’ Steve Krashen how bilingual instruction working for you?
July 15, 2011 at 8:38 AM
As a long-time urban educator, serving bilingual Spanish-English students with special needs alongside English monolingual students, I have observed the awesome difficulties these students face in overcoming the odds. It’s absolutely not fair that these very hard-working bilingual teachers (many of whom are working twice as hard to make sure their students become literate in English) have to prepare, for most of the year, for tests that are just beyond the reach of almost all of these students. Let’s see how English-dominant kids would do, after 30 months of training in Spanish , on Spanish academic tests!