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Highlights from the Status and Trends in the Education of Hispanics - Student Performance in Reading

Executive Summary
Elementary & Secondary School Enrollment
Grade Retention, Suspension, & Expulsion
Dropout Rates
High School Completion
Student Performance in Reading
Student Performance in Mathematics
Student Performance in Science
Trends in Credit Earning & Coursetaking in High School
Advanced Coursetaking in High School
Advanced Placement Examinations
Language Spoken at Home
Enrollment in Colleges & Universities
Degrees Conferred by Colleges & Universities
Adult Education
PDF File of Complete Report Acrobat PDF File - Highlights from the Status and Trends in the Education of Hispanics

Hispanic students had higher NAEP reading scores in 1999 than in 1975. However, Hispanic students' NAEP performance remains lower than White students.

The long-term trend component of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tracks the reading scores of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students from the early 1970s to 1999. (The two following sections also use these data to track performance in mathematics and science.) Hispanic students' NAEP reading scores in the three age groups were higher in 1999 than in 1975, the first year in which scores were reported by Hispanic ethnicity. With the exception of White 17-year-old students and Black 9-year-old students, all other racial/ethnic groups at all age levels had higher scores in 1999 than in 1975.9 Within the period, however, scores fluctuated, with no statistically significant changes observed in the past 9 years for Hispanic students (except for 13- year-olds whose 1999 scores are statistically significantly higher than their 1994 scores) and for students from other racial/ethnic groups at all age levels (except for White 13- year-olds, whose 1999 scores are statistically significantly higher than their 1990 scores) (supplemental table 4.2a).

Despite the gains among Hispanic students at all three age groups since 1975, their performance remains lower than that of White students. In 1999, average scores among Hispanic 9-year-olds were 13 percent below Whites' scores (a gap of 28 points), among 13-year-olds they were 9 percent below Whites' scores (a gap of 23 points), and among 17-year-olds they were 8 percent below Whites' scores (a gap of 24 points). Though no clear trend is apparent, there was a decrease in the size of the score gap between Hispanic and White 17-year-olds between 1975 and 1999, but not between White and Hispanic 9- and 13-year-olds. Except for one instance, no differences were detected between the scores of Hispanic and Black students throughout the assessment years. However, the size of the gaps between White and Black students' scores decreased at all three ages between 1975 and 1999 (supplemental table 4.2b).

When student performance is broken out by parental education attainment categories (as reported by students), NAEP reading score differences between Hispanic and White 12th-graders persist.10 In 1998, there was a 16-point gap between the scores of Hispanics and Whites whose parents did not finish high school, an 11-point gap for those whose parents graduated from high school, a 10-point gap for those whose parents had some education after high school, and a 21-point gap for those whose parents graduated from college.

Source
9  Data for Hispanics are not available back to 1971 when the NAEP's reading assessments were initiated. Initial assessment years for each NAEP trend assessment vary according to subject area, and initial assessment years for Hispanics occur a few years later but also vary according to subject area.
10  In this and following similar analyses in 4.3 and 4.4, grade levels rather than age groups are discussed because a different NAEP assessment (the National NAEP rather than the Long-Term Trend NAEP), which uses grade levels instead of age groups, is used.