U.S. sees reading test scores drop
WASHINGTON — U.S. fourth-graders have lost ground in reading during the past five years, international test results published Tuesday indicate, and the gap between high and low achievers appears to be widening. But the good news is that the United States still scores in the top third of 41 countries and regions on one of the few tests to offer a global assessment of nations’ education and students.
The top performers on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study were the Russian Federation and Singapore, followed by Hong Kong, Ireland, Finland, Poland and Northern Ireland. The exam, administered in spring 2016, covered 319,000 fourth-graders who were a representative sampling of each country or region.
The U.S. average score was 549, above the exam’s center point of 500, but six points below its score five years ago. In that time, the U.S. was bypassed by Ireland, England and Taipei.
The decline is significant and very concerning, said Peggy Carr, a commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, one of the members of the international cooperative that sponsors the test.
The PIRLS test, known by its acronym, doesn’t explain the reasons for countries’ rise or fall in scores. However, in the U.S. case, Carr noted know that scores sunk because more students toward the middle and bottom struggled, while those at the top improved. U.S. girls’ scores also dropped, causing a downward pull.
That points to a widening achievement gap, but the causes are uncertain.
What the United States does well, the test results showed, is educate students at the top. The U.S. has 16 percent of fourth-graders scoring at the top reading level, which PIRLS labels “advanced.” It’s tied in that category with Australia for 11th highest among countries.
More than half the U.S. test-takers scored at the “high” level or above, although that term is a bit deceiving.
“There are some children who are scoring high and are not proficient,” Carr said.
Ideally, educators and policy makers would examine the results to see how teaching could be improved — as has happened in Germany and Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. But Carr acknowledged that with no local results, “school districts and even states are not looking very deeply at these findings.”
On a separate, inaugural test of reading information online, U.S. students performed better. They were outscored on average only by Singapore, Norway, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark.
PIRLS sampled 4,400 U.S. fourthgraders in 158 schools across the nation in spring 2016. The sampling included schools in California, but their identity was not released for privacy reasons.
Internationally, PIRLS showed encouraging trends, with a higher proportion of good readers in 2016 than in 2001 when the survey began. Nearly all students — 96 percent — have a basic level of reading achievement.
The PIRLS exam is administered every five years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Besides countries, some regions, states and cities choose to participate. In other findings: • Girls outscored boys in 48 of 50 countries, including the United States, and in the other two countries there was no significant difference between the two.
• Students who attended preschool or have parents who read with them had higher reading achievement.
• One-quarter of students arrived at school hungry every day, and scored on average 32 points lower than those who are well fed.
• 31 countries showed a decrease from five years earlier in parents’ positive feelings about reading, which is correlated with student reading achievement.
• For 62 percent of students, teachers said the school environment was safe.
To see PIRLS 2016 results, visit