California Students Ranked at the Bottom of National Mathematics Testing, and at the State College Level, the Percentage of Students Needing Remedial Math Grew Much Larger

In addition to U.S. participation in international testing that is discussed on the previous page, the U.S. government has been testing American students for many years. Thirty years of testing by NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called the Nation's Report Card, permits the national government and the states to see how well children of different regions, socioeconomic status and ethnicity compare to one another. Student scores on NAEP tests are given rankings of “Below Basic, Basic, Proficient or Advanced” depending on the percentage of correct answers on the NAEP test. (Nation's Report Card 1996, Trends in Academic Progress 1999)

Compared to the national sample, California children have done very poorly on NAEP testing. For example, in 1996 NAEP testing in mathematics, California fourth graders’ average scaled score was on par with Louisiana and only slightly above Mississippi, Guam and the District of Columbia. The comparative results for other years and other grade levels are similar.

A Rand Corporation report issued this summer, dispelled the myth that California tested so low only because of its large low income and large limited English population. Rand found “(e)ven more dramatic contrasts emerge in the study's pathbreaking, cross state comparison of achievement by students from similar families. Texas heads the class in this ranking with California dead last.”

This Rand study found that a comparison of California students of “similar families” to students from other states placed California on the bottom of national rankings. In fact, on the NAEP’s fourth grade math test, non-Hispanic white students ranked third from the bottom, black students last, and Hispanic students fourth from the bottom among the states.

An awareness of California's academic slide was noticed during the early to mid-1990s by math professors at state colleges and universities due to the significant increase in the number of California high school graduates needing remedial math. The statistics were alarming, and professors noticed that even students who didn't need remediation came with less solid math skills. The increase in the number of freshmen needing remediation in math in the California State University system from 1989 through 1998 was as follows:

From the early 1990s through 1995, more and more Californians grew concerned about kindergarten through twefth grade mathematics instruction.