The “Nation’s Report Card” was released Wednesday showing "historic" declines in math and reading scores among U.S. teens, most of whom were forced into extended “remote learning” during pandemic lockdowns due to pressure from teachers unions to keep schools closed.
According to The National Assessment of Education Progress data, math scores for 13-year-olds fell a stunning 9 points from the 2019-2020 and 2022-2023 school years, which is the greatest drop ever recorded for this subject. Reading scores, meanwhile, declined 4 points.
🚨"Historic declines"
— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) June 21, 2023
🚨"Largest drops ever recorded"
🚨"Continuing declines that began in 2012"
🚨"Reading scores were actually lower than when the assessment was first conducted in 1971"
🚨"troubling shifts in reading habits"
This is a 5-alarm fire. A generation is at risk. https://t.co/l1RdZMJFeF
Students are not bouncing back academically as quickly as was hoped.
While earlier testing revealed the magnitude of America’s learning loss, the latest test casts light on the persistence of those setbacks, dimming hopes of swift academic recovery.
More than two years after most students returned to in-person class, there are still “worrisome signs about student achievement,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the federal Education Department.
“The ‘green shoots’ of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized,” Carr said in a statement. […]
Similar setbacks were reported last year when NAEP released broader results showing the pandemic’s impact on America’s fourth- and eighth-grade students.
Math and reading scores had been sliding before the pandemic, but the latest results show a precipitous drop that erases earlier gains in the years leading up to 2012. Scores on the math exam, which has been given since 1973, are now at their lowest levels since 1990. Reading scores are their lowest since 2004. (AP)
While students across achievement levels saw declines, the lowest-performing students were hardest hit, seeing drops of 12-14 points, while stronger students fell 6 to 8 points.
"There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year," Carr's statement added. "We are observing steep drops in achievement, troubling shifts in reading habits and other factors that affect achievement, and rising mental health challenges alongside alarming changes in school climate. The mathematics decline for 13-year-olds was the single largest decline we have observed in the past half a century."
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