“The bigger, the better, because the children depend on one another,” said Principal Susan Engdall. In a Montessori classroom, “the teacher is sparse, so children have got to be creative and figure things out.” 

It’s a philosophy that not only teaches kids to solve problems, but fosters stronger reading and memory skills by the end of kindergarten than other models of early education, according to from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research. The first nationwide study of public Montessori programs shows that they also achieve more positive outcomes at a lower price tag, mostly due to those larger class sizes. Over the three-year span, public Montessori programs cost $13,127 less than traditional preschool and kindergarten programs, the study found.

Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the report, attributed the findings to Dr. Maria Montessori’s theory on how children naturally learn through imitation, choice and the use of that teach practical skills and academic concepts.

“This is a method that a really brilliant Italian physician made up by watching children,” she said. “She studied them in free environments and said, ‘What are they like and how can we help them?’ ” 

The findings add more complexity to a long-running debate over whether the benefits of early childhood education fade out over time. Some studies show that children who don’t attend preschool often catch up to those who did, leading whether such programs are wise public investments. A found that students who attended Tennessee’s pre-K even had lower test scores in elementary school than those who didn’t participate.

In the new study, the results were particularly strong among children from lower-income families, but Lillard stressed that only programs that stay true to Montessori principles are likely to see such positive results. 

“I see all these schools that claim to have Montessori when what they offer is just a shadow of it or ‘Montessori toys’ sold on the web,” she said. “I expect most of the folks implementing ‘Montessomething’ are also trying to help children, but without [taking] time to understand the model.”

‘For all children’

Publicly funded programs make Montessori education, long preferred by wealthy families who can afford , more accessible to low-income and working class parents. They include charter schools in a network of Montessori microschools called Wildflower, and district programs like Milwaukee’s seven Montessori schools. The district was among the first, over 50 years ago, to offer Montessori in the public sector.

One of the district’s “passion points” is ensuring that Montessori is not “only for certain kinds of people, but for all children,” said Abigail Rausch, the district’s Montessori coordinator. 

Rae Johnson, whose son is now 16, said she could never have afforded a private program in Milwaukee as a single parent working at Starbucks and picking up freelance writing assignments. But Montessori seemed like a good fit for Elijah.

“He always marched to his own beat,” she said. “I knew that traditional school just was not going to work for how he operated.” 

At first, Johnson didn’t understand Montessori’s emphasis on “practical life” skills, like pouring water without spilling or cutting with a knife. At 5, he would come home with a loaf of bread he baked at school.

“I’m like ‘This is what you did all day?’ But then he would be like ‘Oh mom, can we bake?’”she said. “That turned into a math lesson, like ‘OK, if you want to make a cake, let’s do some fractions.’ ”

The Montessori model is among the curricula used in 11 state-funded pre-K programs, according to the . Students traditionally enter Montessori at age 3, but most state-funded pre-K programs begin at age 4. That means districts often face the challenge of paying for the extra year.

The Phoenix Elementary district, which recently because of , began charging $500 per month this year for 3-year-olds entering Shaw Montessori because funds supporting the program were “needed elsewhere,” said Engdall, the principal. The waitlist to get in dropped to zero, but at town hall meetings, she heard requests from parents for things like more field trips and hands-on learning that “already encompass” what Montessori offers, she said. She expects demand to bounce back.

In addition to allowing children more freedom in the classroom, the Montessori method is in sync with the , Lillard said. Classrooms emphasize phonics, and their materials, like , make learning letter sounds and sight words a more concrete activity. In the study, students who won a spot in a public Montessori program through a lottery had “significantly higher scores” on a standardized reading test than those who didn’t get in. 

Montessori students also performed better on an that asked them to do the opposite of what the researcher said. If the adult told them to touch their head, they were supposed to touch their toes. 

Lillard speculated that the results for Montessori students might have been even stronger if the researchers hadn’t started the study the year after the pandemic, an unprecedented disruption that led to in children’s development. Because students were at home in 2020, they didn’t have an opportunity to interact in person and learn from older peers. 

“COVID impacted all classrooms, but it might have had especially strong impacts for multi-aged, peer-learning models,” she said. 

Classrooms don’t have duplicate copies of the same materials, so children, Rausch said, have to practice patience and negotiation if another child is already busy with something they want to use. “How do you plan your day? How do you communicate with someone else? You don’t just grab it out of their hand,” she said. “We’re teaching these really complex skills to 3-year-olds.”

In the study, Montessori students scored higher on a test of understanding other children’s perspectives than those who didn’t attend. But kids who went to more traditional preschools, or stayed home, were a little better at getting classmates to share. 

The fact that social-emotional learning programs are common in public schools, and likely teach topics like sharing, could account for the slight difference between the two groups, Lillard said.

On another test, non-Montessori kids were more likely to keep working on a difficult puzzle when Montessori children gave up — a finding that surprised the researchers. Montessori teachers encourage students to stick with a challenging task until they master it. 

‘A high payoff’

Overall, the results back up earlier research on public Montessori, like in South Carolina that found higher growth in math and reading among Montessori students than among those in traditional schools.

But like all studies, this one has limitations. Comparing kids who did and did not win a seat through a lottery isn’t the strongest research design. Families who apply don’t necessarily represent all families; more tend to be white and financially better off.

“It may be that there were other features of the schools that parents found desirable,” said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. He also questioned whether high absenteeism following the pandemic could have affected the results for either Montessori students or kids in the control group. 

He still thinks the results are promising, and said even non-Montessori programs could adopt multi-age classrooms that include 5-year-olds. But what the field needs is more evidence that the benefits last beyond kindergarten, he said. 

“None of this is to suggest we should ignore or discount the results, only to be cautious,”​​ he said. “Certainly, Montessori deserves more attention. There would be a high payoff to additional rigorous research.”

Dismal releases from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — often referred to as the “nation’s report card” — have become a biannual tradition in recent years as academic progress first stalled, then eroded for both fourth and eighth graders. But today’s publication, tracking long-term academic trends for 9-year-olds from the 1970s to the present, includes the first federal assessment of how learning was affected by COVID-19.

The picture it offers is bleak. In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years. And in another familiar development, the declines were much larger for students at lower performance levels, widening already-huge learning disparities between the country’s high- and low-achievers. 

The results somewhat mirror last fall’s release of scores for 13-year-olds, which also revealed unprecedented learning reversals on the long-term exam. But that data was only collected through the fall of 2019; the latest evidence shows further harm sustained by younger students in the following years. 

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a call with reporters that the “sobering” findings illustrated the learning losses inflicted by prolonged school closures and student dislocation. 

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group of students,” Carr said. “We don’t make this statement lightly.”

Average math scores for 9-year-olds sank by a staggering seven points between 2020 and 2022, the only such decline since the long-term test was first administered in 1973. Average reading performance — generally by schooling than math, and therefore theoretically shielded from pandemic shock — fell by five points. 

Inevitably, that means that fewer students hit the test’s benchmark performance levels than two years ago. For math, the percentage of 9-year-olds scoring at 250 or above (defined as “numerical operations and basic problem solving”) fell from 44 percent of test takers to 37 percent this year; those scoring 200 or higher (“beginning skills and understanding”) fell from 86 percent to 80 percent; even the vast majority scoring at the most basic threshold of 150 (“simple arithmetic facts”) shrank slightly, from 98 percent to 97 percent, across the two testing periods.

No demographic subgroup saw gains on the test, but disparities existed in the rates of decline. For instance, math achievement for white 9-year-olds dropped by five points, but for their Hispanic and African American counterparts, the damage was even greater (eight points and 13 points, respectively). As a result, the math achievement gap between whites and African Americans increased by a statistically significant amount. 

In reading, scores for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites were all six points lower, leaving relative gaps unchanged. Scores for Asian students only fell by one point. 

Notably, the long-term trend assessment differs somewhat from the main NAEP test administered every two years. It follows student performance going back a half-century, and it is taken with a paper and pencil instead of digitally. For the most part, testing items are unchanged from the early 1970s, assessing more basic skills of literacy and computation than are generally seen on the main NAEP.

The broad trend-line has been positive over the life of the exam, and even in the most recent release, student scores on both subjects are far higher than when they were first measured. But Dan Goldhaber, a researcher and longtime observer of student performance, said it was striking to see that upward momentum evaporate so quickly.

“A bit of a hidden story in education, when you look at a swath of 40 or 50 years, is the progress that students have made — and the disproportionate progress that historically marginalized students have made,” said Goldhaber, the of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes. “We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years.”

‘Particularly bad’

One of the most consistent, and consistently worrying, findings of previous NAEP rounds has been the sharp disjunction of students at either end of the performance scale. For over a half-decade, high-scoring students have generally performed a point or two better with each iteration of the test — or at least stayed at the same level — while low-scoring students have seen their scores fall.

The phenomenon of growing outcome gaps is again apparent in the post-COVID results, though it takes a slightly different form. At all performance levels across both subjects, 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.

In reading, 9-year-olds scoring at the 90th percentile of all test takers in 2022 lost two points compared with their predecessors in 2020. But students scoring far below the mean, 10th percentile fell by 10 points.

Consequently, the average reading gap between kids at the 90th versus the 10th percentile grew from 103 points to 110 points in just two years. In math,the divergence grew from 95 points to 105 points over the same period.

Goldhaber said that the trends visible in NAEP performance largely dovetailed with those using test scores from the MAP test, administered by the assessment group NWEA. In multiple data sources, he argued, it has become clear that the pandemic’s effects have been disproportionately negative for already struggling and disadvantaged children.

“It’s not just the drops, it’s where we’re seeing the drops in math and reading tests, and they’re disproportionately at the bottom of the test distribution,” he said. “So the pandemic is reversing a long-term trend of narrowing achievement gaps. That’s particularly bad, to my mind.”

The fact that losses are so heavily concentrated among the lowest-scoring segment of students may help explain what Goldhaber termed an “urgency gap”; neither states, school districts, or even families seemed driven to embrace the generational learning interventions — from dramatically lengthening the school year to implementing widespread one-to-one tutoring — that the scale of learning loss demands. As just one indicator, billions of dollars of federal COVID aid to schools remains unspent more than a year after it was first allocated.

That may change in the wake of the NAEP release. While previous studies have pointed to similar, and similarly inequitable, learning loss over the last few years by using data from the MAP and state standardized tests, the Nation’s Report Card is seen as the authoritative performance metric for American K-12 schools. As NCES Commissioner Carr noted, today’s release provides the first nationally representative results measuring achievement before and after the pandemic. Ninety-two percent of schools where the test was administered in 2020 were re-assessed earlier this year.

Tom Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that NAEP scores definitively affirmed what prior studies have already demonstrated. More observers needed to study the magnitude of the loss, he added, because the proposed academic remedies in most of the country are “nowhere near enough” to combat it.

Kane analogized classroom learning to an industrial process — the conveyor belt slowed in 2020 and 2021, but has resumed functioning since at roughly the same rate as before the pandemic. But to make up for lost time, he argued, it would need to be sped even further.

“What we learned…is that the conveyor belt is back on, but at about the same old speed,” Kane said. “Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to help students learn even more per year in the next few years, or these losses will become permanent. And that will be a tragedy.”

The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.” Various iterations of the exam, each tracking different subjects and age groups over several years, have now shown flat or falling numbers. 

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. In a Wednesday media call, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

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“I asked them to go back and check because I wanted to be sure,” Carr recalled. “I’ve been reporting these results for…decades, and I’ve never reported a decline like this.”

The eight-year gap between 2020’s exam and its predecessor, in 2012, is the longest interval that has ever passed between successive rounds of the long-term trend assessment; a round that was originally scheduled for 2016 was for budgetary reasons. Given the length of time between exams and the general trend of increasing scores over multiple decades, observers could have expected to see at least some upward movement.

Instead, both reading and math results for nine-year-olds have made no headway; scores were flat for every ethnic and gender subgroup of younger children — with the exception of nine-year-old girls, who scored five points worse on math than they had in 2012. Their dip in performance produced a gender gap for the age group that did not exist on the test’s last iteration.

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

In keeping with previous NAEP releases, the scores also showed significant drops in performance among low-performing test-takers. Most disturbing: Declines among 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile of reading mean that the group’s literacy performance is not significantly improved compared with 1971, when the test was first administered. In all other age/subject configurations, students placing at all levels of the achievement spectrum have gained ground over the last half-century.

“It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research.  

Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the reversals in math performance were particularly disappointing because they defied NAEP’s recent trends. For roughly the last three decades, even as politicians and education policy mavens have emphasized literacy instruction, comparatively rapid growth in math scores have made that subject “the star of the show,” Loveless said. 

“Now it almost appears as if those gains are now unwinding, they’re going away. And I don’t think anyone has been able to identify why that’s happening.” 

Bohrnstedt who has followed NAEP for much of his career, said the declines in 13-year-old math performance was notable for another reason: The long-term trends assessment, which been administered by NCES for a half-century, differs substantively from from the content found on other versions of the test. Reflecting the way math was taught in the 1970s, the assessment features more naked math problems and less complex problem-solving than the so-called “main NAEP,” which is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years.

“For the most part, it’s a more basic kind of math than is being taught today, so it’s disappointing to see that we’re still seeing this poor performance by large percentages of our children,” Bohrnstedt said.

Overall, Loveless said, the combination of flat scores on the biennial “main NAEP” and significant declines on this version of the test indicates that American math instruction changed direction over the last decade in a way that may have stymied learning. While hesitating to blame the Common Core curricular reforms that spread during the Obama administration — he recently wrote on the oft-maligned learning standards — Loveless called for further research to investigate possible causes.

“To me, it suggests that beginning a decade or so ago, something went wrong with how we teach math to younger students,” he said. “My own hypothesis is that an emphasis on conceptual understanding has gone too far, that without computational skills to anchor math concepts, students get lost.”

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a defender of the Common Core standards, said that the results could reflect an alternative theory: That the social and financial overhang of the Great Recession profoundly disrupted skills formation for children who are now reaching their teen years. 

“Assuming that Common Core wasn’t implemented until about 2013, the 13-year-olds wouldn’t have been exposed to it until about second grade,” Petrilli wrote in an email. “The nine-year-olds, on the other hand, got it from kindergarten. So why are the 9 year olds holding steady?”

‘Very Discouraging’

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the release is the continued divergence in scores between students at the top and bottom of the performance distribution — a phenomenon that Commissioner Carr called “well-established” during Wednesday’s media session. 

Throughout all four age and subject configurations, when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

In nine-year-old reading, where average scores remained unchanged from 2012 — and scores for the top-performing students ticked up a point — those for students scoring at the 10th percentile fell seven points. The same students lost six points in math, while 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile dropped five points in reading and an astonishing 12 points in math.

Even comparatively low-performers at higher levels lost ground in some respects. Nine-year-olds marked at the 25th percentile dropped four points in math, while 13-year-olds at the 25th and 50th percentiles lost eight and five points, respectively, in the subject. 

“It’s very discouraging to see this steep drop at the 10th percentile in both reading and mathematics, but especially in mathematics,” Bohrnstedt concluded. “It also confirms what we’ve seen with respect to the high percentage of kids performing at the ‘below basic’ level in the main NAEP.” 

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

“These scores represent the last valid, national assessment of student achievement pre-pandemic. For that reason, they will take on historical significance as a baseline measure when future analysts attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”