Gap Widens Between Black and White Students on NAEP

By David J. Hoff

Washington

The slowly rising tide of U.S. student achievement isn't lifting minority children enough to catch up with their white classmates, data from the federal testing program reveal.

Thirty years of statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that overall achievement has increased gradually in reading and mathematics—and stayed about the same in science—but that the gap between white and black students has been widening the past 12 years. The outlook for Hispanic students is mixed, with the gulf between them and non-Hispanic whites expanding in some subjects but not others.

While the math results suggest that black students are mastering basic skills such as addition and subtraction, the findings also point to signs that gains made in the 1970s and 1980s are...