Students in Urban Districts Inching Forward on NAEP

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo and Sean Cavanagh

Atlanta’s middle school students were just starting their academic careers when the district began rolling out efforts to improve reading and mathematics instruction. Now, the district’s 8th graders are gaining faster than much of the nation and many other cities in raising achievement in those subjects, according to the urban district results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress .

The 51,000-student district’s 4th graders also turned in impressive gains on the tests, particularly in reading. Such progress has drawn widespread praise for Atlanta even as the district’s overall scores continued to fall short of national averages and those of several other large-city systems that took part in the study, released earlier this month.

“I’ve been saying since I got here that we would see this improvement move year by year through the grades,” said Beverly L. Hall, the superintendent of the district since 1999. “I keep saying we’ve got to fix the pipeline, … but I still think middle schools are our weakest link that we...