For more than 30 years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has documented the achievement of America's students. This year, NAEP will provide a comprehensive profile of what students who were assessed in 2000 know and can do in the key subjects of reading, mathematics, and science. National reading results at grade 4 were published in April. National science results at grades 4, 8, and 12, as well as state-level science results at grades 4 and 8, will be published in November. Featured in this issue of the Education Statistics Quarterly are mathematics results that were published in August (national results at grades 4, 8, and 12 and state-level results at grades 4 and 8). Reports of the 2000 results include comparisons with results from assessments conducted during the 1990s.

The release of the 2000 results highlights two noteworthy points. First, the 2000 results mark the first decade of NAEP's unique contribution to the body of information on student academic performance at the state level. This is an accomplishment that many thought unachievable when 1988 legislation first authorized state NAEP on a trial basis. (The same legislation established the National Assessment Governing Board—NAGB—to set policy for both state and national NAEP.) The second point is a more substantive one, which has emerged from the results themselves. Over the past decade, differential progress has been made by students in the key subjects of reading and mathematics.

At the end of its first decade, state NAEP—no longer considered a “trial” since 1996—is doing well as the nation's only ongoing independent measure of student achievement at the state level in the key subjects of reading, writing, mathematics, and science. State NAEP is the only assessment that allows states to compare their students' performance to that of students in other states using a common assessment instrument. This capability has made state NAEP a valuable commodity for the state education policy, research, and assessment communities.

• Every state and jurisdiction, with the exception of one, has participated in at least one of the state assessments.
• An average of 40 states and jurisdictions volunteer to participate in each state assessment cycle.
• As many as 15,800 schools and about 400,000 students volunteer to participate in the now typical two-subject, two-grade state assessment program.
• As NAGB has laid new ground for more contemporary content frameworks to guide development of the NAEP assessments, both the state and national assessments have become progressively more challengin in the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they assess as well as in their assment specifications (e.g., the number of multiple-choice items has been reduced, while the number of constructed-response items has been increased).

NAEP national and state-level results show that students across the nation are making marked progress in mathematics but very little progress in reading. In general, national reading scores have remained about the same since 1992 except for a small increase for eighth-graders between 1992 and 1998, when the most recent eighth-grade reading assessment was conducted. Consistent with these national results, the results of state-level reading assessments at grade 4 show that relatively few states had significant score increases or declines between 1992 and 1998. Mathematics results, on the other hand, have shown progress over the past decade for nearly every subgroup of the population and across almost all states and jurisdictions that participated in the assessments. Over the past decade, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, males, females, and students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades have all shown increases in their mathematics scores. Improvement has also occurred at all percentiles. Thus, although the achievement gap in mathematics between Whites and minorities has not changed over the past decade, students scoring in the two lowest percentiles (the 10th and 25th), in which minorities are disproportionally represented, have shown score increases since 1990 at all three grades. Out of the 36 states and jurisdictions that participated in both 2000 and the first state assessment in 1990, 27 showed increases over the decade. The achievement level results in reading and mathematics—that is, the percentages of students attaining the Basic, Proficient, and Advanced levels adopted by NAGB—showed similar patterns.

Thus, the data described in this issue of the Quarterly are a fitting example of the substantive value of a decade of measuring student achievement. As intended when NAEP was first mandated, the NAEP 2000 Mathematics Assessment providees an excellent basis for dialogue among curriculum experts and practitioners concerning “what students know and can do.”