Missouri’s NAEP Scores: Room for Improvement

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the NAEP results in October of 2019. This no-stakes assessment measures the National and state-by-state performance of 4th and 8th grade students in Reading and Math and is taken every two years. For the 2019 iteration of NAEP, Missouri’s scores fell in on all four tests, which is similar to the trends observed nationwide. The biggest decrease came in 4th grade reading, where students lost 5 points. These downward trends exist across all groups of students tested in Missouri. In this brief, we describe Missouri’s 2019 results, subgroup performance, and changes in performance over time. We pay special attention to differences in achievement by race and poverty-level.