The Impact of Reading Programs as a Map Project Strategy
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 was enacted to protect the United States' most vulnerable students and was signed into law in January 2002 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). For many years, black, Hispanic, special education, and limited English proficient students were not achieving at the same level as their white, middle-class counterparts because schools were not held accountable for their individual progress. The achievement gap is well documented in previous research at all levels of education. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from 1996 to 2000, obtained from a national sample of 8th- and 12th- grade students indicated that for each grade level, black and Hispanic students scored significantly lower than whites in reading, mathematics, and science (Braswell, Lutkus, Grigg, Santapau, Tay-Lim, & Johnson, 2001; Grigg, Daane, Jin, & Campbell, 2003; O'Sullivan, Lauko, Grigg, Qian, & Zhang, 2003). In Kentucky, the Minority Student Achievement Research Project (MAP) is an educational initiative formed to address the achievement gap and progress all students toward proficiency within the state. Seven school districts (partnership sites) were selected for participation in the program, and individual schools within the districts were selected for participation based on the criteria that at least 25% of their student population was minority (KDE, 2000). This study was designed to determine if the implementation of reading programs as a MAP strategy impacted 4th" and 7th" grade students' reading scores on the Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT) of achievement, as well as the 6th" grade level of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills 5 (CTBS/5). The researcher was also interested in how the implementation of these programs may affect the achievement gap between black and white students in the sample. The sample was comprised of 338 4th" grade Kentucky students enrolled in a public elementary school within MAP participating districts during the 2002-03 school year. Archival data of 4th" grade students' scores on the KCCT reading section from 2000 through 2005 were requested and obtained from the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). Analyses revealed that MAP students did not perform significantly better than Non-MAP students on the KCCT at any grade levels. Likewise, results showed that MAP students did not obtain significantly higher Percentiles on the reading test of the CTBS/5 at the 6th" grade level. The analyses also did not show a convergence of achievement scores between black students and white students regardless of MAP participation on either the state reading test or the norm-referenced test across administrations. The implications of the findings are discussed.
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