American students are in a deep learning recession. Fourth and eighth graders are scoring worse in reading and math than a decade ago. Yet a major new report from the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) barely mentions Common Core, one of the most disruptive education experiments in a generation.
Last month, CEPR released an Education Scorecard Report examining reading and math performance for fourth and eighth graders from 1990 to 2025. The report offers the first nationwide district‑level comparison of learning loss and evaluates how remote learning, federal funding, and absenteeism‑related reforms shaped student outcomes during and after the COVID‑19 pandemic.
The authors of the report highlight two key timelines:
- 2003 to 2015, where notable improvements were made across the country
- 2015 to 2025, where consistent decline started and continues
They also assert two possible causes for the decline after the improvement: the first being the increased use of social media by students, and the second being the reduction in federal accountability programs.
According to the data on 13–17 year olds, increased use of social media is evident, going from 24 percent use in 2014–15 to 46 percent in 2022. But studies on recent cell phone bans show no impact on student achievement, which weakens this as a cause. There is no evidence to show this cause has anything to do with fourth-grade achievement, especially since most fourth graders are 9 years old and not heavy social media users.
The reduced federal accountability analysis looks at the failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) toward the goal of having 100 percent of children reading at grade level by the end of fourth grade. After a few years, it became apparent this goal was beyond the reach of most school districts across the country. A new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, gave a reprieve to these goals. No new substantial federal accountability was put into place, causing the authors to claim that without federal threats, government schools lose the incentive to ensure that all students learn.
Multiple investigations show that government systems effectively gave up on teaching children to read using proven methods. APM Reports found that government schools relied on disproven whole‑language strategies “that make learning to read harder” long after science rejected them. The National Reading Panel confirmed in 2000 that systematic phonics was essential, yet federal and state education systems failed to enforce those findings, allowing ineffective methods to dominate classrooms for another two decades.
Moreover, the CEPR report notably omits any consideration of Common Core as a potential contributor to the decline in student achievement. In August 2010, 47 states began to implement the Common Core standards and aligned curriculum. This was a seismic shift in both the content and practice of American education.
Looking carefully at the National NAEP scores, the improvement trend actually ended in 2013. Typically, large-scale impacts from curriculum adoption or structural changes often require three years or more to demonstrate shifts in student achievement. Clearly, it is reasonable to consider that Common Core implementation in 2010 might be the cause of the decline in student achievement in America beginning in 2013.
The legendary power behind the Massachusetts Education Miracle, Sandra Stotsky, describes it this way:
“Most governors, state commissioners of education, state boards of education, and Chambers of Commerce seem to have an unshakable confidence in Common Core’s standards as the silver bullet that will make all K-12 students college and career ready. This confidence is remarkable… given Common Core’s standards are vastly different from those in the one state—Massachusetts—whose pre-Common Core standards led to greatly increased student achievement in reading, mathematics, and science in all its public schools.”
The results were impressive. Every student group in Massachusetts, boys and girls, rich and poor, gifted and struggling, showed improved achievement.
Despite these impressive results, under significant political pressure and looking at federal financial incentives, Massachusetts adopted Common Core. By 2017, just like in other states, Massachusetts student achievement began to decline, which continues today.
The 2026 Education Scorecard Report points to some recent success in states adopting a “new” program called Science of Reading, which centers around five big ideas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The assertion that these ideas are new is absurd. These teaching techniques were the primary method of teaching reading in colonial times (e.g., The New England Primer, 1687) and remained popular through the 1800s (e.g., McGuffey Readers, 1836). Subsequent “brilliant new ideas” like Whole Language were the downfall of reading.
Education in America is a mess. Student achievement is abysmal and continues in decline. Without an honest assessment of what went wrong, we will never make the necessary changes to help children learn. Common Core is a failure. Despite rumors of its demise and repeal, it remains the structure of most state standards and the basis of pedagogy taught in colleges of education.
The decline in America’s government education system is one of many reasons why United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) has been at the forefront of fighting to return education to its proper local roots.
Melanie Kurdys, Michigan Chapter President at United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE), is an accomplished businessperson, educator, researcher, activist and mother of three adult children and eight grandchildren.