Poor Math Scores Come as Education Cuts Continue
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 10/27/2009
California’s budget crisis has come home to roost as the 2009 Nation’s Report Card puts the state lower than the nation’s average for fourth graders and eighth graders on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
California’s fourth graders earned 232 out of 500 points, compared to an average of 239 for U.S. students overall. The state’s eighth graders averaged 270 points out of 500, still below the nation’s 282 average score.
The $6.1 billion California cut from public school funds during its budget crisis this year can’t help. Already, teachers, school librarians, superintendents, and even parents and students are scrambling as schools lay off educators and increase class size.
David Driscoll, chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the NAEP, says that math instruction has to be better—and that starts with teacher comprehension. “Classroom teachers, especially at the elementary school level, are crucial to math instruction in many ways,” he says in a statement. “We’re clearly not requiring enough of our math teachers, and we’re not challenging them in pre-service or equipping them as well as we should.”
The NAEP, which Congress mandates must be given every two years, measured 168,800 fourth graders and 161,700 eighth graders in both public and private schools this year, with results proving that fewer than 40 percent of our nation’s students are proficient in mathematics. And while some states did better than their Western brethren, it was not by much.
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New York Governor David Patterson at a recent conference talking about more education cuts. |
New York’s fourth graders scored only 241 points, just two points higher than the national average, and eighth graders earned 283 points, just one slim point higher—with basically no gain since last measured in 2007. And these scores come on the heels of New York Governor David Patterson proposing education cuts of $686 million for the current 2009/2010 school year across the state—the first so-called midyear cut to education since 1991.
“If we are to succeed, we all must work together to provide comprehensive, challenging math courses for future educators,” says Driscoll. “In turn, we can improve the performance of students in such an important subject.”
