Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Some Big Lies of Education start with journalists (even at the biggest of media outlets).

“One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.

Kristof’s piece in 2023 can be traced back to a similar claim by Emily Hanford in 2018: “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s,” including a surprisingly ineffective graphic:

The student reading proficiency Big Lie grounded in misrepresenting or misunderstanding NAEP is likely one of the most complicated Big Lies of Education.

In media and political rhetoric, first, the terms “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading” are commonly jumbled and used inappropriately as synonyms.

Achievement levels such as “basic” and “proficient,” used in NAEP for reading, are misleading and complicated for most people not familiar with technical terminology.

NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level (although even that claim is problematic since no standard exists in the US for “proficient” or “grade level”), and “proficient” on NAEP is high:

Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). *What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency.* Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf

NAEP testing and data are normative, measuring what a general population is achieving (not individual students), and as noted above, NAEP “proficient” is aspirational.

State accountability testing is measuring individual achievement, and states tend to use “proficient” as a measure that falls in the “basic” range of NAEP, suggesting that state-level proficient is “grade level” approximate or at least what most student should be able to achieve at that grade [1]:

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales, 2007–2019

Hanford’s and Kristof’s Big Lie, then, is a combination of blurring NAEP achievement levels with grade level reading achievement and manufacturing a reading crisis with that misinformation.

Ironically, NAEP grade 4 reading scores for a decade show that 2/3 of students are reading at or above grade level, the inverse of the false crisis claims of the media:

The Big Lie about reading proficiency and NAEP help perpetuate the Big Lie about educational crisis, but it also masks the more complicated truths: the US has no standard metric for assessing the national reading achievement of students, and focusing on manufactured reading crises distracts reformers from addressing what we can identify—inequitable access to reading proficiency among minoritized and marginalized populations of students.

I recommend the following to understand the essential failure, the Big Lie, of using NAEP to manufacture a crisis around reading proficiency in the US: