In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.
The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.
There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.
Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.
“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”
But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.
On a Tuesday phone call with reporters, Dr. Carr did not directly address President Trump’s campaign promise to shut down or severely reduce the federal Department of Education, the agency for which she works. But she did mention that education data collection could change because of the administration’s push to tamp down on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The NAEP exam is considered more challenging than many state-level standardized tests. Still, the poor scores indicate a lack of skills that are necessary for school and work.
In fourth-grade reading, students who score below the basic level on NAEP cannot sequence events from a story or describe the effects of a character’s actions. In eighth grade, students who score below basic cannot determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument.
Dr. Carr did point to Louisiana fourth graders as a rare bright spot. Though their overall reading achievement was in line with the national average, a broad swath of students had matched or exceeded prepandemic achievement levels.
Louisiana has focused on adopting the science of reading, a set of strategies to align early literacy teaching with cognitive science research. The resulting instruction typically includes a strong focus on structured phonics and vocabulary building.
That approach has become widespread over the past five years, but does not seem to have led to national learning gains — at least not yet.
Experts have no clear explanation for the dismal reading results. While school closures and other stresses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic deepened learning loss, reading scores began declining several years before the virus emerged.
In a new paper, Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that declines in American children’s performance are echoed in tests of adults’ skills over the same time period. So while we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media, he argues.
Children and adults both watch more video on their phones, meaning “there is a displacement of reading text, which is probably increasing over time in degree and severity,” he said. “The phone’s ability to make our attention spans shorter and give kids less ability to stay focused is quite likely to come home to roost.”
In math, higher-achieving fourth graders — those performing at the 75th percentile and above — are doing as well as similar fourth graders were in 2019. But fourth graders performing below average in math had not made up the lost ground.
In eighth-grade math, only higher-achieving students showed improvements, but they remained below prepandemic levels.
“It’s great that more kids are getting to basic, but that’s a midpoint. We need to be thinking hard about getting more kids to proficiency,” said Bob Hughes, director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that has recently focused on improving math education. “Higher-level math, beginning in middle school, is mission critical.”
A student survey distributed alongside NAEP found that 30 percent of eighth graders were enrolled in algebra, down from 32 percent in 2019.
Student absenteeism has improved since 2022 in both fourth and eighth grade, with about 30 percent of students reporting missing three or more days of school in the previous month. But at both grade levels, absence rates remain significantly higher than they were prepandemic.
Dr. Carr said she had an important message for parents: If they want their children to excel academically, they must attend school regularly.
