Higher percentages of eighth-graders who were eligible for free lunch through the National School Lunch Program performed at or above Basic and at or above Proficient in 2011 than in any of the previous assessment years.
Because of the improved quality of the data on students' eligibility for NSLP, the percentage of students for whom information was not available has decreased compared to the percentages reported prior to the 2003 assessment. See the proportion of students in each category in the NAEP Data Explorer.