The Nation’s Report Card came out Thursday, and at first glance, the fourth-grade reading score looked awfully flat. The score inched up one point from 2011, the last time the National Assessment of Educational Progress was administered, and the gain was not large enough to be deemed statistically significant. The overall proportion of proficient readers remained disappointingly low, with 65 percent of U.S. fourth graders still failing short of the proficiency mark. Among students from low-income families, 80 percent don’t read proficiently. Gaps based on income, race and ethnicity remain wide.

But the report shared good news, too. Nine places saw significant gains on fourth grade reading scores: Colorado, the District of Columbia, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Tennessee, Washington state and the Department of Defense schools.

And with the help of our friends at KIDS COUNT, we dug deeper into proficiency rates for students living in poverty and found some interesting trends. In 33 states and DC, the proportion of fourth graders reading proficiently increased in the past two years.

In West Virginia for instance, the percentage of low-income fourth graders who score proficient climbed from  18 to 24 percent.  In Iowa, it rose from 17 to 23 percent. In all the places where overall reading scores went up, the percentage of proficient low income readers also rose. The highest proficiency rate for all students–47 percent–came in Massachusetts, while the highest rate for low-income–27 percent–came in Florida.

The natural question is why. Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees NAEP, cautions against reading too much into the scores. “NAEP is very good at telling us where we stand,” Buckley said Wednesday in a call with reporters, quoted in The Educated Reporter blog. “But it’s not very good at telling us why. It’s very difficult in a study like this to tease that out.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan mentioned that the eight states that have already implemented the Common Core State Standards all showed improvement in at least one category. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson greeted the gains by city students in both fourth and eighth grades as confirmation “that the reforms that we put in place are working. When you raise the bar for teachers and you raise the bar for kids, they rise to the occasion.”

For our part, we remain encouraged by the energy and commitment we see across the country to ensure that low-income children master reading by the end of third grade. With more than 30 states and 135 communities putting a stake in the ground on this issue—bringing together policymakers, educators, nonprofits and philanthropy–we have a real opportunity to improve early reading.