MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WHNT) — With Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s inauguration into her second full term in office this week, she has promised to make education a top priority for her administration. The governor has set a goal for Alabama to rank in the top 30 states in math and reading, but this raises the question of where Alabama currently stands in these subjects.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, Alabama ranks 39th in reading and 40th in math among fourth-grade students in the 2022 rankings. All rankings mentioned in this text are based on the average scale score that NAEP assigns to all the jurisdictions it collects data for.
Alabama’s fourth graders did, however, perform below many of their neighboring states. In math, Mississippi ranked 34th, Georgia 30th and Tennessee 23rd. In reading, the closest to Alabama’s ranking was Tennessee at 36th, with Georgia ranked 28th and Mississippi ranked 22nd in the country. Florida’s fourth graders ranked in the top ten in both 2022 and 2019.
Both rankings show an improvement from 2019 when the last set of scores was available. In that year, Alabama’s fourth graders ranked 52nd in math, just surpassing Puerto Rico, while Alabama ranked 49th in reading.
For comparison, in 2019 Georgia ranked 39th in reading, while Tennessee ranked 32nd and Mississippi ranked 30th. The only southern state that ranked below Alabama in reading that year was Louisiana at 50th, followed by New Mexico at 51st, and there was no 53rd-ranked jurisdiction that year due to a lack of data from Puerto Rico.
In the fourth-grade math rankings for 2019, among Alabama’s neighbors, Georgia ranked 36th, Tennessee ranked 26th and Mississippi ranked 24th.
Eighth-grade students paint a slightly different picture. According to the NAEP in 2019, Alabama ranked 52nd in math and 49th in reading, surpassing Alaska, New Mexico and the District of Columbia. Mississippi, a neighboring state, ranked 46th in reading, while Georgia and Tennessee came in at 32nd and 31st respectively. When it came to math, the three states outperformed Alabama with Mississippi ranking 47th, Georgia 35th and Tennessee 31st.
In 2022 the state’s math ranking showed a similar improvement to the fourth-grade ranking with Alabama rising to 47th. However, the state still performed below other nearby states with Mississippi at 46th, Georgia at 32nd and Tennessee at 30th.
When it comes to reading, the eighth-grade students’ ranking did not show a similar improvement to the younger ones, with Alabama remaining at 49th. In 2022, Georgia’s eighth graders ranked 20th in reading, while Tennessee came in at 36th and Mississippi ranked 46th.
NAEP is a congressionally mandated program administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, itself part of the U.S. Department of Education. NAEP compiles education data for each state and provides rankings for grade 4 among all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and students living on American military installations. The tests are administered every two years to fourth and eighth-grade students and every four years to 12th-grade students, although data for 12th-grade students is incomplete on NAEP’s website.
According to the data, Alabama has shown an improvement trend, although whether that trend will continue to progress remains to be seen.
