(KCPW News) Utah’s fourth and eighth graders showed no significant improvement in math or reading in the new results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. State Office of Education Spokesman Mark Peterson says scores for both grades basically held flat from 2009.
“Obviously, we’d like to see growth, but also given the demographics of the situation with increasing demographic diversity, with increasing poverty in Utah schools and declining funding, to not have any backslide is a good thing,” he tells KCPW.
The achievement gap between white or Asian-American students and their Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander counterparts also didn’t show significant change. The same was true of the gap between low-income students and their peers.
“That gap has been there for some time, it continues to persist and getting after it, remediation and that sort of thing, is a resource-intensive piece of the puzzle,” says Peterson.
Fourth-grade students performed a little better than the national average on math, while eighth-graders were above average in reading.
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