Do you believe that in the course of 33 years, an improvement of anywhere of 1.5% to 4% on public education average reading scores is significantly different? The experts (?) at National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) believe this to be true and state it on their website.

Between 1971 and 2004, nine year olds reading performance on a scale of 1 to 500 grew from 208 to 219 an increase of 4% while 13 year olds reading performance jumped 4 entire points on that same scale from 255 to 259. To learn about the dismal performance of 17-year-olds who did not grow at all