Pupils’ Reading Skills Up; Writing Still Poor

WASHINGTON —  Schoolchildren are reading a little better than they did in 1971, but they still can’t write, the annual Nation’s Report Card showed today.

The report found only “subtle changes in reading performance at the national level” since the first reading assessment in 1971. There was no improvement in an already-low writing performance.

Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos released the gloomy findings, saying, “As a nation, we should be appalled that we have placed our children in such jeopardy.

“Reading and writing are the basic tools of learning, the crux of the academic enterprise,” Cavazos told reporters. “Without solid literacy skills we can never expect to see improvements in math or science, history or geography. And the costs will be staggering.”

The Nation’s Report Card was prepared by the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress, a project of the National Center for Education Statistics.

The Reading Report Card found some improvement among students aged 9, 13 and 17, the three age groups periodically tested. A study found that both 9- and 17-year-olds were reading significantly better in 1988 than they were in 1971, and 13-year-olds were reading as well as in 1971.

“The overall picture suggests a nation of students who were reading better than their counterparts did in 1971, but it must be emphasized that the progress is slight and could be short-lived,” the report said.

The report said the gains for 17-year-olds may be “partially a legacy of progress made by these students when they were age 9.”

“Unfortunately, 9-year-olds born more recently have shown a pattern of small but steady declines during the 1980s, perhaps foreshadowing similar declines at ages 13 and 17 in the years ahead as these students move through our educational system.”

Minority students showed real gains in reading, according to the report. During the nine years from 1971 to 1980, the difference in average performance between black and white 9-year-olds decreased from 44 to 32 scale points, but eight years later, in 1988, the difference remained almost 30 points, the study said.

The Writing Report Card tested about 18,000 students in grades four, eight and 11 on their ability to write informative, persuasive and imaginative pieces.

The key result was that the levels of writing performance in 1988 appeared to be substantially the same as in 1974. Many students continued to perform at minimal levels on the writing assessment tasks, and relatively few performed at adequate or better levels.

According to the report, in both 1984 and 1988, females were better writers than males at all grade levels. Black students improved slightly in some categories of written English, such as punctuation and sentence structure.

Also, less than 15% of eighth and 11th graders wrote papers judged adequate or better on an informative writing task that asked students to compare and contrast alternatives. Only 28% of 11th graders wrote adequate responses on the least difficult persuasive writing task.

Finally, the report said the fondness for writing declined with age--55% of fourth graders said they liked to write, compared with 42% of eighth graders and 37% of 11th graders.