Reading and Math Scores in Latest National Report Card Highlight COVID and Pre-COVID Trends

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which gives knowledge for the Nation’s Report Card, is remitted by Congress and is the biggest nationally consultant take a look at of scholar studying. NAEP assessments had been first administered in 1969. Today, the assessments in math and studying are given each two years to a broad pattern of scholars in fourth and eighth grades.

Students held regular in math and even made up floor

In fourth grade, the typical math rating ticked up barely in contrast with 2022, ending a pandemic slide. In truth, white, Black, Hispanic and economically deprived college students all confirmed modest features, on common.

“In fourth grade, it seems that, regardless of where students were, they were improving,” says Lisa Ashe, a math advisor with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP coverage.

That stated, fourth-grade math scores nonetheless remained under pre-pandemic 2019 ranges, with one exception: Alabama was the one state the place fourth-graders’ common math scores surpassed 2019 scores. (In 2022, lawmakers there passed a law aimed toward bettering math proficiency for all Okay-5 college students in the state.)

But COVID-19 isn’t all responsible. An extended view of fourth-graders’ math scores — and scholar achievement extra broadly — exhibits these scores started stagnating and even declining earlier than the pandemic. Math scores peaked round 2013. Multiple training researchers inform NPR they aren’t sure why.

 

“That is the multitrillion-dollar question,” says Dan Goldhaber, an training researcher on the University of Washington who has studied pandemic studying loss.

One factor we all know is that fourth-grade math efficiency improved across the identical time the previous federal training legislation referred to as No Child Left Behind (signed in 2002) enforced strict new accountability necessities. When these necessities had been phased out (starting in 2012) and finally changed (in 2015), math efficiency, particularly amongst lower-performers, fell.

That’s only one doable clarification for the slowdown that the pandemic worsened. Goldhaber suggests studying might even have been set again by the Great Recession, by children’ elevated entry to smartphones and tablets or by the ripple results of a decline in children studying for enjoyable. (Since 2017, fewer and fewer college students have reported to NAEP that they take pleasure in studying.)

“It’s important to understand what caused that earlier stagnation if we’re going to get out of the mire of the pandemic,” Goldhaber says.

For eighth-graders, math scores held regular in 2024 in contrast with 2022. But as with fourth-graders, they remained under pre-pandemic 2019 ranges.

What’s extra, the Nation’s Report Card highlights some worrying divergence occurring inside these scores. The highest-performing eighth-graders improved in math in contrast with 2022, however the lowest-performing college students moved in the other way, dropping floor in 2024.

“That actually caused alarm,” Ashe says of the widening achievement hole. “We need to meet the needs of these students that are in the lower percentiles, because something that we’re doing is not working for those students.”

Overall, 39% of fourth-graders and 28% of eighth-graders scored at or above NAEP’s normal for proficiency in math. That’s a bit of higher than in 2022.

The NAEP report warns towards evaluating these outcomes to state-reported numbers, as “the NAEP standard for proficiency represents competency over challenging subject matter, a standard that exceeds most states’ standards for proficient or grade-level achievement.”

Reading: The unhealthy information obtained worse

The outcomes in studying weren’t practically as hopeful as they had been in math:

Fourth-graders continued to lose floor in 2024, with studying scores barely decrease, on common, than they had been in 2022 and a lot decrease than they had been in 2019.

In 2019, 35% of fourth-graders scored at or above the take a look at’s studying proficiency normal.

That determine dropped to 33% in 2022 and, additional, to 31%, in 2024.

As with math, these declines aren’t solely the fault of the pandemic. Fourth-grade studying scores started falling years earlier, round 2015.

Only one state, Louisiana, noticed its 2024 fourth-grade studying scores surpass 2019 scores.

It’s price remembering: This present spherical of fourth-graders, from the 2023-2024 college yr, had been in kindergarten when the pandemic first closed faculties, and many spent some or all of first grade studying remotely.

Eighth-graders’ 2024 studying scores additionally dropped in contrast with 2022, with simply 30% of scholars acting at or above NAEP’s proficient normal.

NAEP classifies college students at one in every of three ability ranges: superior, proficient or the bottom, primary. According to the outcomes, the share of eighth-graders studying under NAEP’s primary normal “was the largest in the assessment’s history.”

Not solely that, however the worst-performing readers in 2024 scored “decrease than our decrease performers did 30 years in the past for fourth and eighth grade. That’s how low these scores traditionally have dropped,” says Peggy Carr, commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics.

Not one state improved its eighth-grade studying scores in contrast with 2022, not to mention 2019.

The connection between poverty and efficiency

This yr’s NAEP outcomes embrace a brand new, extra exact index for figuring out college students’ socioeconomic standing (SES), and the outcomes present, in stark element, what academics and researchers have lengthy understood: That poverty and efficiency are deeply related.

For instance, the overwhelming majority (77%) of fourth-grade college students in the very best SES class — the wealthiest children — carried out above the nationwide common in studying.

Of the fourth-graders in the bottom SES class, although, the outcomes are practically flipped, with simply 34% performing above the nationwide common.

The outcomes in math efficiency had been equally disparate.

On a optimistic notice, whereas many big-city districts made vital features in fourth-grade math with their economically deprived college students, a handful of districts did exceptionally nicely, together with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, Guilford County Schools (additionally in North Carolina), Baltimore City Public Schools and the San Diego Unified School District.

Missing college is getting in the best way of studying

When college students took the newest NAEP assessments, in early 2024, they had been asked what number of days that they had been absent the earlier month. The outcomes are barely encouraging: A smaller share of fourth- and eighth-graders reported lacking 5 or extra days of faculty in the previous month in contrast with 2022.

But throughout the board, lower-performing college students had been extra prone to report lacking 5 or extra days of faculty in the earlier month, in contrast with higher-performing college students.

Simply put, lacking college means lacking studying.

When college students miss 10% or more of a school year, they’re thought-about “chronically absent,” and as NPR has previously reported, the charges of persistent absenteeism doubled through the pandemic.

The link that NAEP exhibits between lacking college and decrease educational achievement doesn’t shock Hedy Chang, head of Attendance Works, a company dedicated to combating persistent absenteeism. “It’s not just affecting academics,” she says of absenteeism. “It’s affecting social development and executive functioning.”

To proceed on the trail of bettering attendance and in flip scholar achievement, Chang means that districts have a look at the scholars who’re lacking essentially the most college and the hurdles they’re going through.

“You might not be able to take it all, tackle it all, at once,” Chang says. “You might have to tackle it in bits and pieces, either by barrier or by grade or by this subset of schools.”