And the numbers are absolutely meaningless to anybody outside of the NM educational system in oh-so-many ways.
I don't know what the criteria are. Were they expected to read 10 pages of a Shakespeare play and comment on the influence that had on Dickens and Hemingway in a 500-word essay? Were they asked what the underlying or semantic subject of "broken" was in the sentence "I could tell that my little brother had been in my room because my My Li'l Pony figurine had been broken and stomped"? Or were they simply asked to correct the grammar in "My brothers was older than me" in a selected response question format?
Or maybe just read out loud, "Run, spot, run! I want a good grade on this chromatography lab!"
My experience with such standardized tests is this: The first year given, there will be a big change. Since standards seem to be monotonically rising in most places, I expect the firs administration of a test to produce lower test scores across the board. In year two, I expect test scores to rise slightly as teachers figure out how to teach the test. I expect test scores to rise slightly more in years three and four as the means of teaching to that particular test become widespread and students take them to heart. Scores that decline after year 2 are meaningful; small increases show no improvement; large increases might indicate real improvement in student achievement or merely reflect deepening of test-targeted teaching and narrowing of academic breadth.
I once had to take an entrance exam for a certificate program and badly failed the essay portion. I used words the computer grader didn't know, I used irony, I used sentence fragments and rhetorical questions. I then looked up the requirements and got 100 the second time through: I stated the thesis, adduced 3 facts using common words in flat, declarative sentences lacking hypotaxis of any kind. No sentence was more than 10 or 11 words long. It was boring by computer-manual standards. But it matched the rubric. That meant I could write.
As for the meaningfulness of the number overall, even if you know what the standards are: If you look at literacy rates over the last 200 years you see really weird, easily misinterpreted stats. If you could read signs and make your mark, you were literate. In other cases, you had to read the Bible, but you'd have heard it read out loud each Sunday for years. (Hell, I can "read" the Vulgate. I know a little Latin, but I know the NT backwards and forwards.)
Later standards rose as people needed to cold-read simple texts. Literacy rates fell and then increased again. In the '70s in MD we had to read OTC medicine labels and maps to be "literate." In Texas, "literacy" a couple of years ago wasn't just being able to read, it was being able to reason from the text, adduce evidence, read for bias and stance, write a standard essay. My kids in science class can do those things with fiction, but can't read the much denser non-fiction texts they get in my class. Beginning last year, non-fiction was the new big push so 9th graders started getting passages from geology, history, economics, and biology to supplement Homer and Hawthorne and Lee.
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