NAEP shows Kentucky’s reading gaps grew in 2009

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading results for 2009 have been a subject of a number of previous posts. In this one, let’s look at the black-white achievement gap.

This graph is largely copied from a 2007 NAEP report titled, “How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress,” except that I added in the 2009 data. That 2009 data comes from the 2009 NAEP Reading Report Card.


Very simply, the reading gap between Kentucky’s fourth grade blacks and whites has jumped around over the years, but the new 2009 figure matches the worst ever recorded by the NAEP.

Please note that the national average figure is for all students. In fact, on the 2009 NAEP Fourth Grade Reading Assessment, Kentucky’s whites scored one point lower than the national white average, and the state’s blacks only matched the national average.

This next graph shows what is going on in eighth grade reading.

Again, the gap has been jumping around, so a real trend is hard to spot. However, the 2009 gap is larger than the gap back in 1998 when eighth grade reading was first assessed by NAEP.


Kentucky’s whites scored two points below the white national average in 2009 and the state’s blacks scored four points above blacks across the country. Still, our gap hasn’t materially changed since the first days of NAEP grade eight reading tests.