Math skills for students in the United States are not where they need to be, and the students in West Virginia are even further behind.
After making significant strides in the 1990s, school programs in the state and across the nation have hit something of a plateau, recent numbers from the Nation’s Report Card show. The “No Child Left Behind” law set a goal of having 100 percent of students showing proficiency in reading and math by 2014, but, at least on the math front, we are not even close.
Nationally, about 38 percent of fourth-graders and 33 percent of eighth-graders showed proficiency in the 2009 analysis. That means about two-thirds of students do not have a solid command of the math content and skills for that grade level.
Those numbers were essentially flat to the last report in 2007 and not up much from 2003, when the scores were 31 percent for fourth-graders and 27 percent for eighth-graders.
In West Virginia, the scores for fourth-graders actually fell back, while eighth-graders were about the same. But of greater concern, we are still far behind much of the country. Only 28 percent of fourth-graders showed proficiency in math and only 19 percent of eighth-graders.
Only five states scored lower than West Virginia for fourth-graders, and only one scored lower for eighth-graders. Kentucky’s scores were in the middle of the pack, and Ohio’s scores were even better.
As state education officials point out, demographics have a lot to do with these achievement measures, and West Virginia has more than its share of lower-income students. It also should be noted that West Virginia has made a lot of progress since 1990, when the proficiency score for fourth-graders was only 12 percent and eighth-graders only 9 percent.
But the lag behind so many other states — including many with poverty problems, too — is still troubling. Moreover, the fall-off in achievement from the fourth grade to eighth grade is more pronounced than it is on the national level. That less than 20 percent of those middle school students have a solid grasp of math is pretty frightening.
Certainly, you have to ask the question of whether the “No Child Left Behind” initiative is working, since schools made more progress in the 1990s than they have since the program was implemented. A New York Times analysis of the recent scores noted concerns that some states have made their standards less rigorous to avoid the penalties that NCLB provides for failing schools.
David Driscol, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, also said last week that a major factor continues to be a “lack of content knowledge and mathematics preparation of our teachers.”
West Virginia recently implemented new math content standards and objectives, and, hopefully, those will help move the needle in the future. But schools and parents need to be mindful that this is an area where standing still often means falling behind, and students in our region need to achieve more in the classroom to be competitive in the global economy they will face as adults.
— The Herald-Dispatch
This editorial does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Times West Virginian editorial board.
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