After eight years of implementing the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and other school reforms, how much progress have states, school districts, and schools made in raising achievement for students from all backgrounds and closing achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, income, and gender? To help answer this question, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) analyzed trends in reading and mathematics performance and achievement gaps for several groups of students: African American, Asian, Latino, Native American, and white students, as well as low-income, male, and female students. The authors looked at trends on state tests from 2002 (or a more recent year in some states) through 2009 at grades 4, 8, and the high school grade tested for NCLB. They also compared the direction of trends between 2005 and 2009 on state tests and the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). All 50 states and the District of Columbia participated in this study, which marks the fourth year of CEP's research on student achievement. Not all states had the data needed for every analysis, however. States were considered to have sufficient data for an analysis if they had three or more years of comparable test data through 2009 and if the number of students in a particular subgroup was large enough to yield reliable trends. Four main conclusions emerged from this study: (1) Achievement gaps are large and persistent; (2) Every major student group has made gains since 2002 on state reading and math tests. But even when achievement has increased for all groups, gaps have not always narrowed; (3) For most student groups, gaps on state tests have often narrowed since 2002. Gap trends vary, however, based on the student group and indicator of achievement examined; and (4) Although gaps have narrowed more rapidly for some groups than for others, at the current rates of progress it would take many years to close most gaps. (Contains 52 tables and 11 footnotes.) [For "State Test Score Trends through 2008-09, Part 1: Rising Scores on State Tests and NAEP", see ED511842.]