In education, the Grade 8 reading assessment is a watershed. By that time, students have attended school for at least nine years — ample opportunity for individual challenges to be identified and overcome. If students cannot read as well as they should by eighth grade, the conventional wisdom is that it is unlikely they will be able to learn anything else easily or well.
That makes the latest NAEP results especially distressing. In 2002, 13 percent of black eighth-graders read at grade level, compared with 39 percent of whites — a gap of 26 percentage points. Last year, 16 percent of black students were at or above grade level, compared with 44 percent of whites — a difference of 28 percentage points. The gap is widening.
Worse, nearly 90 percent of black males in the eighth grade did not read at grade level last year. Will they catch up? Will they drop out? Or will they be “graduated,” still unable to read well enough for a career or college?
Adult statistics aren’t any better. Nineteen percent of adult black Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 30 percent of whites; and only 16 percent of black males have a college degree. More than 80 percent of young black men, then, have little chance of obtaining middle-class jobs or raising a family much above the poverty level.