The newest “nation’s report card” AKA the National Assessment of Educational Progress has just been released.

At first glance, the NAEP results (from 2005) don’t have good things to say about the academic achievement of our nation’s high school seniors. In a nutshell: high school students don’t seem to have made any progress since the last time the test was administered – and the results are worst for students of color and poor students.

And that’s just for the kids who make it to senior year and only on basic reading and math skills.

Reading performance was the same as 2002 – which was lower than in 1992. Just 73 percent of students performed at or above the basic level, meaning they could retrieve information from a detailed document.

In math, just six in 10 students performed at or above “basic,” which means, among other things, that they could use the Pythagorean Theorem to determine the length of a hypotenuse.

The score gaps between white and black students remained unchanged.

The data on low-income and minority students are “painful and alarming,” say the folks at the advocacy group Education Trust, who have published a detailed analysis.

The Education Trust points out that elementary school students continue to improve performance on the NAEP. They also point out that more high school students are taking more rigorous courses – and their GPAs are going up.

They conclude that you can take all the rigorous courses your high school can dish out – but if your courses aren’t taught by good teachers, it won’t matter. And students in poor and minority communities are least likely to have highly qualified teachers, they say.