Arkansas NAEP scores prompt state education chief to urge continued LEARNS implementation, teacher supports

Secretary Jacob Alleva told the Arkansas Education Committee that the federal 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results show Arkansas remains below the national average in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math and that the state must keep implementing the LEARNS reforms to improve outcomes.

Alleva, presenting the NAEP “snapshot in time,” said the national assessment samples schools and students deliberately and that Arkansas’ sample for each tested grade and subject included about 90 schools and roughly 1,800 students. He described the results by percentile and said "we have to keep the conversations around access to high quality early learning, deploying the literacy coaches into our most struggling schools, making sure that every student has access to a high quality teacher, and get systematic explicit instruction uninterrupted 5 days a week." He framed the department’s goals through what he called the "3 Es": that policy and practice put students on pathways to be enlisted, enrolled or employed.

Why this matters: Committee members pressed for specifics because the NAEP is widely used for state comparisons and policy planning. Alleva tied the figures to policy choices the state made in the 2013–2015 period — including use of a college-and-career predictor assessment — and said current reforms under LEARNS, started in 2023, are intended to reverse long-term declines.

The department’s findings and priorities

- Performance and sampling: Alleva said Arkansas’ fourth-grade reading and math results place the state in the lower range of the midpack among states; he emphasized the lowest-performing decile of Arkansas students trails the national average by a larger margin than higher-performing Arkansas students. He noted NAEP uses a sample of about 5,000 schools nationally and about…