Little to no change in Tennessee's national test scores

The percentage of young men in eighth grade reading Below Basic in 2015.

The dip in scores comes as the country's employers demand workers with ever-stronger skills in mathematics to compete in a global economy. But the state average is also lower than previous years.

On math and fourth-grade reading, Oregon students performed about as well as their peers nationally.

Here's a look at what the NAEP scores mean - and don't mean - as explained by Carol Burris, who retired this year as an award-winning principal at a New York high school. "We like to see multiple years and multiple occurrences before we express any level of concern".

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Tuesday the declines don't surprise him. The top scorers in this category were Grade 4 students in Massachusetts, where 54 percent scored proficiently or better and in Minnesota, where 53 percent did so.

Washington's black students scored well below white classmates in the state, and the achievement gap for Washington's black eighth-graders was significantly wider than the national average for black eighth-graders.

At least one of the national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, said the drop in NAEP scores is a testament that the administration's education agenda, paired with scarce federal dollars, is hurting students.

During the 1970s and '80s, at the height of school desegregation efforts, the gap in scores between our nation's white and black students dramatically narrowed.

America's schoolchildren are also increasingly poor. Florida's average 8th-grade math score was also below the average national score for public-school students.

Students each year are randomly selected to take hourlong tests in a variety of subjects.

The gap between Tennessee students' NAEP and state test scores ranged from 10 percentage points in fourth-grade math to 25 points in eighth-grade math. Fifty-four percent of Tennessee eighth-graders met the state's math proficiency bar, but just 29 percent achieved proficiency on the NAEP exam. The National Assessment of Educational Progress releases scores at the national and state level but not at the district level.

FOURTH-GRADE READING: Maryland's average score fell from 232 in 2013 to 223 in 2015.

In eighth-grade reading, Los Angeles' low-income students have increased their scores faster than students in any other district that have reported results since 2003, growing 16 points.

Nationwide, math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better - flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders.

The Nation's Report Card test was not created to be aligned with Common Core or any standards, rather it is intended as an independent barometer of student achievement.

Education leaders said the latest national scores were surprising and disappointing, but said that scores have improved over the long term. "Right now, what's going on in many states is a wholesale change in math instruction", said Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard.

I would like to add one topic to the mix: In Georgia and throughout the nation, we have changed our expectations for what our kids need to know and be able to do in mathematics.

A study released Monday showed that a few items included in the national assessments are not covered by the Common Core before the grades in which they are tested. For now, Carr and others said, folks shouldn't rush to conclusions.

"It's going to be a really tough political argument in the states that saw the biggest drops", said Polikoff.