America’s schools keep flunking
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Talk about throwing good money after bad. Washington spent $190 billion to make up for the damage from the Covid school shutdowns.
What did it get students and taxpayers? Worse academic performance. That’s the bottom line from the 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) report released on Wednesday. Fourth and eighth grade reading scores declined by two points on average since 2022—roughly as much as they did between 2019 and 2022.
Some 33% of eighth graders scored below “basic" on the reading exam—a record low. Eighth-grade math scores remained about the same as two years ago but were eight points lower than in 2019. The sliver of good news is that fourth-grade math scores increased by two points since 2022, but this doesn’t make up for the five-point drop between 2019 and 2022.
The takeaway: Even with children back in school full-time, they still aren’t learning. Worse, the achievement gap increased. High math performers in both grades scored better last year while low performers did worse or the same.
Test scores for students scoring at the 75th and 90th percentiles in reading have marginally improved since 1992, but they’ve declined for students at the 10th and 25th percentiles. Covid school shutdowns may be having a lagged effect. The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, notes that absenteeism still hasn’t returned to “pre-pandemic levels." But the trend of academic decline began several years before Covid and is apparent on other standardized tests, as Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute has noted.
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