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Alabama’s fourth graders leapfrogged other states up the rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, results released Monday show.

The simple reason? Alabama students held scores steady while other states’ scores dropped dramatically. In other words, the nation’s misery is Alabama’s gain.

Yet improvement in national rankings does represent a lot of work, officials said ahead of the Monday announcement, from the individual school to the statewide level.

“Getting our NAEP scores up like this helps us on the national stage,” state Superintendent Eric Mackey said. And that helps with recruiting teachers and businesses to Alabama, he added.

“It helps show the right message: that we’re focused on academic achievement and improvement.”

Holding steady on scores took a lot of work, Mackey said, given the challenges of the pandemic. Scores were last released in 2019. Since then, education officials aligned the state’s standards and the annual standardized test with what’s tested on the NAEP something Mackey said had never been done in Alabama.

Alabama’s fourth graders’ scores went up in reading and math, bucking the nation’s majority downward trend. Alabama was one of only a handful of states to raise scores in math and two dozen to do so in reading.

Eighth grade scores were steady in reading, but declined – like every other state – in math.

“The results show the profound toll on student learning during the pandemic, as the size and scope of the declines are the largest ever in mathematics,” said National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr.

Describing national results as “appalling and unacceptable,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on schools to do more to help students recover during a press call with reporters.

“This is a moment of truth for education. How we respond to this will determine not only our recovery, but our nation’s standing in the world.”

Calling for “bold action,” Cardona said schools must raise the bar.

“We know what to do. We got into this profession to make a difference for children. We need everyone’s best now.”

Even though experts caution not to rank states against each other because the test was designed for states to measure their own progress over time, Alabama’s poor showing on the NAEP has been criticized for years.

In that respect, Mackey said he felt good about where Alabama’s scores place the state. “We’re certainly in a better position than we were three years ago,” he said, referring to the 2019 NAEP results.

“Relative to other states we gained a lot of ground,” Mackey said. “We think we’ve got the right plans. We’re on the right trajectory. Now we have to hit the gas and keep it up because other states are also going to be trying to recover from the pandemic.”

Alabama’s fourth graders’ ranks skyrocketed:

• In math, the state’s rank jumped from dead-last 52nd to 40th while the average score on the test went up by less than a point, and
• In reading, Alabama’s rank rose from 49th to 39th, with the average score up by nearly 2 points.

Click here if you are unable to see the chart below showing Alabama’s fourth grade reading and math scores and the national public school average for 2022 and 2019.

Eighth grade scores pulled Alabama further off the bottom:

• In math, the state’s rank jumped from dead-last 52nd up to 47th, even with an average score drop of 4 points, and
• In reading, Alabama’s average score dropped three points, but that kept the state in 49th position, ahead of the District of Columbia, West Virginia and New Mexico.

Click here if you are unable to see the chart below showing Alabama’s eighth grade reading and math scores and the national public school average for 2022 and 2019.

All states’ scores are available at the Nation’s Report Card website.

The NAEP was given to just under 2,000 students – randomly selected and statistically sound – across Alabama at the start of 2022, delayed from a year earlier due to the pandemic. It will be given again in 2024.

While NAEP gives tests in civics and other subjects, this is the only set of NAEP results that are broken down by state. The current version of the NAEP was first given in 1990, and all states began participating in the NAEP in 2003.