These scores are not just numbers; they signal lost earning potential for today’s children and weakened competitiveness for tomorrow’s workforce. The pandemic deepened the decline, but students were already behind. Without action, the cost will be measured in lost opportunity and billions in economic losses.

from Stanford shows losses in student achievement before and after the pandemic equal those during the pandemic, and that the losses are continuing. The study found restoring student achievement to 2013 levels would raise the lifetime earnings of today’s average student by an estimated 8% — producing dramatic and sustained gains for our nation’s economy.

For our kids to be more financially successful as they age into the workforce, schools have to reverse NAEP declines over the past decade. There’s no time to spare.

This year’s NAEP proficiency results for public school students show reading scores have reached their , with only 29% of eighth graders and 30% of fourth graders achieving a proficient score. While the slide in has slowed, scores still remain below pre-pandemic levels, and the performance gap between high- and low-performing students has .

Lower performances by today’s students mean a down the road; proficiency in literacy and numeracy has been linked to several , including more fruitful college opportunities and higher wage jobs.

The research from Stanford estimates learning loss over the past decade has cost our country over . This translates into having an average of 6% higher GDP every year for the rest of this century if students were still at 2013 NAEP proficiency levels.

At the individual level, the average current student can expect to have a lifetime income that is 8% below that of a 2013 graduate. Because disadvantaged students have suffered deeper learning losses, their incomes can be expected to fall by over 10%.   

For our students to earn more — and be able to compete with their peers worldwide — educators can’t leave their outcomes to guesswork. Schools need to ensure students are learning the fundamentals using evidence-backed methods — and constantly and consistently measure their progress using clear, objective standards.

Some states made noteworthy progress on NAEP this year: Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. Each has a track record of high expectations and strong accountability.

These states use an that puts reading and math achievement front and center. They measure what matters — proficiency and growth — and they report results in a way families and educators can understand. Transparency and rigor are fueling their progress.

It has been very difficult to implement effective large-scale reforms, but we now have examples of getting strong increases in literacy and mathematical proficiency when evidence-based policy solutions are implemented faithfully. For example, states are seeing academic growth using the following three approaches.

First, states need to invest in effective personnel. They can do this by and by supporting strong teaching through professional development in evidence-based practices such as use of high-quality instructional materials and assessment data to inform instruction. Further, hiring of math and has shown success.

Using data from and , which are short assessments to flag struggling students early, has helped ensure schools are using necessary interventions with high quality instructional materials. While many successful states mandate the use of screeners, others can incentivize districts to use them by providing the materials for free.

Finally, Alabama has shown that it is possible to begin turning around the math problem. Two years after passing the , Alabama has returned to for fourth grade NAEP math, jumping from last in the nation in 2019 to 31^st this year. This comprehensive math law includes such as elementary school math coaches; increasing the amount of math instruction per day to 60+ minutes; and the adoption of high-quality instructional materials.

Students aren’t going to catch up if states don’t make their progress a priority. Some states are leading the way, but more policymakers need to focus on improving student outcomes using tested methods that raise the bar and measure progress. The nation’s collective economic future depends on rewarding effective schools and reversing the achievement slides of the past dozen years.

Responding to lawsuits filed after the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled more than 100 key research contracts in February, the department in June said it planned to reinstate 20 of the contracts. And a lawsuit will give a short reprieve to 10 federally funded . The department is also asking the public for guidance on how it can modernize the Institute of Education Sciences, its research, evaluation and statistics arm. 

“They’re not saying in any explicit way, but you see this ‘build-back,’” said a longtime assessment professional familiar with IES, who asked not to be named to preserve professional relationships.

The department likely realized that, despite the DOGE cuts, IES still had a lot of congressionally mandated work to do. “I think there were some ‘Oh shit!’ moments, but nobody would say that, because they’re not going to criticize DOGE or the president.”

, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, called the developments “cautiously encouraging,” noting also that NCES plans updates to several surveys and administrative data collections. And it’s releasing existing surveys such as , which analyze data each year from all U.S. colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 — where IES was at 10 prior to the DOGE cuts and 1 a month ago — we would place it at 3 or 4 today,” said Chavous. 

But she added that “severe staff shortages” at the department “continue to threaten data quality and research progress. We remain deeply concerned about the long-term impacts of these cuts on researchers and others who rely on federally collected and supported data.”

Despite the Trump administration’s promise to shutter the Education Department, it seems to be looking for ways to keep its research activities moving forward. Last month, the administration published a , seeking public input on how it can modernize IES. That effort will stop temporarily during the current government shutdown.

The department has also brought in , a longtime Washington, D.C., education researcher, to take on the task of reforming IES. Northern, on leave from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is expected to remain at the department until December. While her remit lasts just six months, it is giving researchers hope that having one of their own advising McMahon will yield positive results.

“I am more hopeful than I was three months ago that there will be some reinvention, rather than a death, of federal education research,” said a scholar at a top nonprofit research organization with several long-term federal contracts. “To me, it seems just absurd that the federal government would say, ‘We’re getting out of the realm of doing education research,’ because education is so fundamental to the future of the country.”

In interviews, several researchers and policy experts said they’re similarly optimistic, but most requested to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out could jeopardize future funding and relationships with administration officials.

Of Northern, one researcher said she’s “very much someone who believes in empirical evidence. So I could not think of a better person to be advising the Trump administration on the future of IES.”

Mike Petrilli, Fordham’s president and , said he was pleased that McMahon would turn to her for guidance. “I always felt it was a good sign that they wanted somebody like Amber,” he said, viewing it as “an indication that they did want to rebuild” IES, not get rid of it.

Petrilli, who has on occasion of Trump since his first election in 2016, said he’s optimistic that “the people, the political appointees now at the Department of Education, understand the importance of research and evaluation and statistics.” But Musk’s DOGE operation, he said, was “able to do great damage, terrible damage, before anybody had a chance to stop them.”

Another person who works closely with researchers in the field, who asked not to be identified, said they have been assured by top administration officials that “There’s a lot that’s going to come back online — it’s just going to come back online in different ways that some of the field will be ready for, and other parts of the field will not be ready for.” The source said the department is looking into performance- and outcomes-based contracting, a more flexible system that lets agencies more clearly. 

Administration officials, meanwhile, have acknowledged “the chaos of the first six months,” which they don’t want to repeat, the source said. They’re in the process of shifting to “a different sort of phase where we want to see results for this money that we’re spending.”

In a statement, U.S. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the Trump Administration “is committed to supporting a national education research entity that delivers usable, high-quality data and resources for educators, researchers, and other stakeholders. This has been clear in the Secretary’s repeated commitments to protect NAEP. NCES and IES were in desperate need of reform.”

McMahon in May told congressional lawmakers she had rehired “” of the approximately 2,000 department employees who were laid off last winter, though a department spokesperson disputed this.

Several people said they were surprised and heartened that IES last month began for eight — and possibly more — high-level assessment jobs at the National Center for Education Statistics, for work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But several experts said there’s a lot of work to do if the administration genuinely wants to rebuild its research infrastructure, given DOGE’s deep cuts last winter, when the ad hoc agency trimmed the NCES staff from about 100 employees to three. 

“It’s hard to be too optimistic, given the limited resources that NCES has in particular,” said , a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies state higher education finance and the financial viability of higher education. 

Kelchen said the administration’s own priorities could make McMahon’s work more challenging, noting that an Aug. 7 executive order by President Trump forces NCES to undertake a massive that will collect data on admissions practices going back five years by race, sex and test scores, among other indicators. 

The order alleges that race-based admissions practices “are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”&�Բ�����;

The survey, said Kelchen, is “a massive data collection effort — and it’s hard to see how it ends up being successful, especially retroactively.”

Poor NAEP results

Several people said recent poor student results on NAEP have likely catalyzed much of the strong support for IES.

“They knew the NAEP results were going to be bad, and they got these NAEP job descriptions up quickly,” said one observer.

Several others agreed, but just as many said the recent poor results bring a new urgency to reshaping NAEP so that its next generation of tests are both high-quality and relevant to educators.

“NAEP is falling further and further behind in terms of the gold standard, which it hasn’t been for some time,” said a former IES official. “But what is the plan? What’s the vision? NAEP just confirms bad news all the time. So what are we going to have in terms of policies to correct it?” 

Another person familiar with NAEP predicted that even with NCES’s smaller staff, next year’s tests “will likely go off O.K.,” but that many reporting functions, such as score reports broken out by states, have been cut to shrink costs, making the results less useful. “It’s one thing to collect the data — it’s another thing to report it in a way that people can use.”&�Բ�����;

This person said NAEP is well-known for robust reporting platforms such as its , but IES has already said it will end future district-level reporting for 8th-grade history and science tests, among others. “If we’re short-handed there, then people will say, ‘What’s the value of NAEP?’”

Looking ahead, this person worries that cuts to functions like the , an extensive database on public K-12 education, and other efforts could compromise the actual tests after 2026. “If we don’t have good sampling and weighting, then NAEP is just a test. It’s not the Nation’s Report Card, because we need all those data to be able to make it a truly national picture.”

The ‘education improvement industrial complex’

A prime example of the changes taking place is the expected reinstatement of the 10 regional education labs, or RELs, which were funded to the tune of $336 million, but were closed in February after the department alleged, without offering much evidence, that a review “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.” It noted, for instance, that a lab based in Ohio had been advising schools there to undertake “equity audits.”

But educators nationwide have rallied to the labs’ defense, noting that in 2019 the REL Southeast, based at Florida State University, helped the state of Mississippi improve reading results so much that its fourth-graders rose from 49th in the nation to 29th — the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”&�Բ�����;

The 10 labs will now be able to begin the process of restarting their work for the remainder of the federal contract, the department revealed in a in June. 

A researcher who works with school districts to design programs said the centers could be reconceived to be more helpful to teachers: “There’s so much money. And if you think about what the products were, it’s hard in all cases to imagine that amount of money was yielding such exceptional change in the educational system that we need to keep going exactly as-is.”

This person noted that outfits like the RELs often benefit from the support of an “education improvement industrial complex” that lobbies for continued funding. The DOGE cuts, this person said, badly undercut that support system.

At the same time, a few observers said IES more broadly should continue, no matter what the fate of the Education Department in this administration. 

“I believe firmly that there should be an Institute for Education Sciences, even if it is configured differently,” said , senior director of the University of Chicago Education Lab. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, I believe in the power of R & D — and I think we need it more than ever, given declining test scores and the implications that has for our international competitiveness.”

Achievement is dropping across the board on NAEP scores, she noted. “So we have to start investing in this area if we’re going to make progress.”

For his part, Kelchen, the Tennessee scholar, said the disruptions of the administration’s first nine months haven’t taken too much of a toll on his work. Aside from an IES grant proposal that simply never got reviewed, he conducts research without federal assistance and without using federal restricted use data, which typically contains confidential information that isn’t publicly released. Accessing it requires an . 

But he said the chaos is changing his classroom: Last spring, he taught a graduate course and remembered, “Half the nights we met for class, there was some big announcement coming out of the Department of Education that affected higher ed finance,” disrupting what he thought the class would talk about. In one case, he said, a Feb. 10 discussion of higher ed expenditures was cut short by the news of DOGE’s IES grant cuts “breaking halfway through class.”

More broadly, Kelchen said the uncertainty is making everyone at the university uneasy. “It’s an interesting time to be an academic department head, just given that enrollment’s uncertain, funding’s uncertain,” he said. “We could have normal international student enrollment in a year. We could have zero. We just don’t know about anything.”

But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, across a range of tests, grade levels and subject areas, the scores of the lowest-performing students have fallen dramatically, while the scores of the highest-performing students have been flat or close to it.

The next assumption might be that these declines must be tied to long-running achievement gaps. Indeed, it is and remains true that white and Asian students tend to do better than their Black and Latino peers, and children with disabilities and those who are not native English speakers tend to do worse than average.

But over the last decade, declines have not been about specific student groups. Instead, the story is largely about a growing divergence between higher- and lower-performing kids.

To see this visually, consider the latest in 12^th grade math. As the chart above shows, scores were rising from 2005 to 2013. Not only that, but they were rising the fastest for the lowest-performing students, those in the bottom 10%.

But scores peaked in 2013 and then began falling, especially for the lowest-performing kids. While the performance of the top 12^th graders didn’t fall that much, even during COVID, scores for the lowest-performing students had fallen 6 points by 2019 and have plummeted another 5 points since then.

Looking at the graph, it’s clear there is a cascading effect down the performance spectrum. Students in the middle have lost far more ground than those at the very top, and kids at the very bottom have seen even steeper declines.

What’s more, these patterns in test after test. It’s worth unpacking the data a bit further to understand how these trends are playing out across groups. The first table below looks at the changes from 2013 to 2024 for the top and bottom 10% of students across racial and ethnic categories in 12^th grade math. 

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Student Race/Ethnicity and Performance Level (2013-2024)

The scores for Black and Hispanic students fell across the performance spectrum. But that’s not the main story here, because the bottom was falling so much faster than the top across all racial and ethnic groups. In fact, the lowest-performing white students showed the biggest declines.
Sorting the data by income, the same pattern holds:

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Student Income and Performance Level (2013-2024)

Again, low-income students scored worse than higher-income students. But the bottom 10% percent of students who do not qualify as low-income suffered the biggest slide.

Tim Daly has documented according to parental education levels for eighth grade math, and that holds for 12^th grade scores as well. Even among students whose parents graduated from college, the lowest performers suffered particularly large declines:

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Parental Education and Performance Level (2013-2024)

In 12^th grade math, at least, the scores of students with disabilities and English learners have actually held up pretty well. Performance rose 0.4 points for students with disabilities and 2.5 points for English learners. Neither group saw declines among the lowest performers.

But consider what happened to students without disabilities (scores for the bottom 10% fell 11.9 points) and native English speakers (the bottom plummeted by 10.1 points).

What’s behind these trends? The best evidence to a of in-school and out-of-school factors including screen time, instructional shifts that de-emphasize mastery of basic skills and the lack of school-level accountability for results. It may sound counterintuitive, but policymakers looking to raise the ceiling on student achievement should start by making sure they raise the floor.

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

Scores last week on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test, often called “the Nation’s Report Card,” showed that just 22% of seniors were “proficient” or above in math, down from 24% in 2019. And just 35% were proficient in reading, down from 37% in 2019. Higher percentages in 2024 also scored in NAEP’s “below basic” level in both subjects.

That has prompted a chorus of protests from experts who believe that, among other problems, digital devices and social media are dragging down U.S. teens. 

Harvard scholar Martin West, who co-leads the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said in an the day the scores appeared that emerging evidence of widening achievement gaps in other developed countries suggests that we should be looking at “factors that transcend national boundaries.”

The rise of smartphones — and particularly the advent of social media use among young people — seems a likely culprit, he said.

“The timing fits,” West wrote. “Phones distract students from math homework just as much as they do from reading.” And surveys show that disadvantaged students spend the most time on their devices, “while motivated students of all backgrounds may be able to use them to enhance their learning.” He noted that disadvantaged students saw the biggest score drops.

While there’s no definitive causal link between smartphones and learning, West said, the circumstantial evidence is “sufficiently strong” to justify experimenting with all-day “bell-to-bell” phone bans in schools, as well as continued efforts to “rein in students’ near-constant use of other digital devices while in class.”

A 2024 found that about one in three teachers consider students distracted by cell phones “a major problem.” Among high school teachers, that figure rises sharply, to 72%. More recently, Pew researchers 74% of U.S. adults say they would support banning cellphones during class for middle and high school students, up from 68% last fall. 

Much of that momentum grows from years of efforts by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has pushed for schools to . Haidt, author of the mega-bestseller , says there’s growing evidence of an “international epidemic” of mental illness that started around 2012, caused in part by social media and teens’ uptake of smartphones in the early 2010s. 

“Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children,” Haidt wrote in 2023, weeks after the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media use in particular can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

Murthy said there wasn’t enough evidence to determine if social media use “is sufficiently safe” for young people, especially during adolescence, “a particularly vulnerable period of brain development.” While the evidence suggests that social media could put kids’ mental health and well-being at risk, he admitted that more research is needed to fully understand its impact.

To San Diego State University professor and psychologist Jean Twenge, the new NAEP scores “are yet another indication that academic performance is suffering and we need to do something.”

The academic declines predate the COVID pandemic, she said, reaching back to the early 2010s, just as smartphones became popular — Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. “So yes, teens having access to their phones during the school day could certainly be one of the causes of the declines in test scores,” she said in an email.

Twenge, author of the new book , said bell-to-bell phone bans “are one obvious and usually low-cost solution.” That idea, she said, “has only started to catch on in the last year, so we don’t yet know what impact it’s having.” She noted that it’s not even clear how many schools have adopted them, but theorized that they’ll make a difference.

“When the phone is available, it’s just too tempting for students to look at it,” she said. “When rules are only classroom-by-classroom, many teachers allow students to use their phones after they’ve completed their work. What teenager wouldn’t rush through their work to get on their phone? It’s setting them up to fail.”

‘The research is not strong, but public opinion is’

Research on the topic and related issues is beginning to emerge, but doubts about its utility leave a few researchers skeptical.

Writing in Education Next last week, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham noted that more screen time is with poor attention regulation, for instance. Most studies, he said, support the hypothesis that children’s screen time is associated with poorer attentional control, but the size of the observed relationship, on average, is small.

He warned that educators should keep in mind the context of kids’ digital device use, such as the notion that more screen time could coincide with particular styles of parenting that could also affect kids’ abilities. “Parents may allow their child more access to screens in an effort to improve their child’s mood or behavior,” he wrote. “Or screen activities may keep the child occupied so parents have time for their own pursuits.”

And of course wealthy families may have easier access to pastimes that aren’t screen-based. “In each case,” Willingham said, “it may be elements of the context that have the critical effect on attention, not digital activities per se.”

In one 2024 study, University of Delaware researchers from 1,459 middle schoolers, ages 11 to 15, finding that their academic achievement decreased as their self-reported use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X increased. Controlling for age, gender, race and ethnicity, they found that participants’ grades dropped as the frequency of their social media use across all four platforms rose.

By contrast, a by Chinese researchers found that medical students who used social media platforms like WeChat to discuss their work did better and were more engaged in discussions. 

Marilyn Campbell, a professor in the school of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Australia’s , cautioned that current peer-reviewed research hasn’t found an airtight causal connection between mobile phone use and students’ academic performance, their mental health or even the likelihood of being cyberbullied. 

“The research is not strong, but public opinion is,” she said. “Public opinion is driving this, or else why would politicians get involved?”  

Australia has had a near-total cell phone ban in public schools since 2023, and lawmakers have sung its praises: In South Australia, where the ban didn’t take effect until 2024, showed a 63% decline in “critical incidents involving social media” in the first six months, with behavioral issues down 54% and violent incidents down 10%. But Campbell has noted that there’s little reliable research on academics, mental health and the like.

Banning phones in school makes a kind of logical sense to many people, she said, because there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting it. But she said it’s often a false connection. Campbell compared it to watching summer ice cream sales rise and concluding that it’s ice cream that makes sunglasses fly off the shelves. 

In a of 22 research studies from 12 countries, Campbell and several colleagues found “little to no conclusive evidence” that broad mobile phone bans in schools produce better academics or mental health, or that they reduce cyberbullying. 

Conversely, she said, it’s not entirely clear if banning cell phones in school could have unintended harmful consequences, such as parents finding it more difficult to get kids to do homework or to put away their phones at home “because they’ve got to catch up on all their social media that they haven’t been able to during the break times,” Campbell said.

She also said it’s possible that students in schools with phone bans are staying up later with their phones and missing sleep, which would also have a negative effect on academics.

Campbell also said broad bans leave young people with less practice self-regulating their device use. “Kids leave our schools when they’re 18,” she said. “They’re adults, they’re going to university, and they have had no training [or] practical experience of saying, ‘I really want to look at my phone, but I know it’s rude or it’s the wrong thing to do, and I’m going to control myself and not do this.’ They’ve had none of that experience when they go to work, when they go to further education.”

And in a few cases, she said, bans on devices can hurt poor kids. She recalled a school in Australia with a lot of kids from low-income families whose principal said many students have phones, but few can afford data plans. The principal, she said, encouraged kids to bring their phones to school so they could take advantage of the school’s Wi Fi. 

“He said, ‘If I can get them to school, I can keep them safe. They’re not wandering around the malls and getting in trouble. I can feed them, and hopefully they might learn something.’”

Tom Kane, an economist and education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the next year or so will be key as scholars push to study U.S. school cell phone bans already in place for evidence that they’ve made a difference. “That’s central to this question of what’s been driving the loss in achievement,” he said.

While such bans can’t address all of the conditions making achievement suffer, he said, they can eliminate distractions during the school day. He just hopes the findings see the light of day sooner rather than later, with a scientific consensus emerging over the next year or two.

“We can’t wait a decade to figure out what was the effect of these cell phone bans,” he said. 

Harvard’s West, who also serves on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said policymakers also need to consider higher, clearer standards for students and ways to hold schools accountable for ensuring kids meet state standards — he noted that, for all the derision No Child Left Behind generated, “it produced results” such as steadily rising levels of achievement, driven by large gains for the nation’s lowest-performers — the opposite of what we’re seeing now.

West’s two sons have phones, and he admitted that he takes comfort “in being able to reach my boys as needed.” But he also appreciates experts’ calls to put phones away. “Coupled with greater accountability around student achievement, it may be the single most important thing we can do to help our kids learn,” he wrote.

While the evidence for phone bans improving academics might take years, one teacher said he’s seeing results already, in a matter of weeks. 

Blake Harvard, an AP high school psychology teacher in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville, said Alabama’s , enacted in May, is already having an effect since school began in early August. “I’m getting more from my students than I did” last year, he said. “Now, of course, that’s anecdotal, but I sincerely think discussions are better. I’m getting more student participation from [students] in the past who may have been trying to sneak a cell phone.”

Harvard, the author of a recent book on the psychology of student attention, said he and his colleagues initially worried that students wouldn’t put up with a ban. “But they’ve been fine about it, honestly,” he said. “Very quickly, everyone was just like, ‘Well, O.K., this is the way it is.’”

Harvard makes sure he talks to classes each fall about the brain science behind attention, such as how multitasking is a myth. “You can’t consciously pay attention to two things at once,” he said. 

Looking at one’s social media notifications while driving is dangerous. Likewise, he said, “If you’re looking at all your notifications in class, that’s getting your attention. So the lesson itself can’t get your attention.”

Just a few weeks into the semester, Harvard said his students have already figured out that while the law says they can’t have a phone “on their person” during the school day, they can keep it stowed in a backpack on the floor — the school doesn’t have lockers. As he was walking among desks the other day, he noticed a phone visible in a student’s open backpack. He joked that he might have to write her up, to which she replied, “It’s not ‘on my person.’” 

Harvard thought to himself, “Well, if students didn’t know what ‘on my person’ meant before this, in legal parlance, they know what it means now. They figured it out quickly.”

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

In the first nationwide indicator of how older students have fared since the pandemic, the news is bad, but not surprising: COVID took a bite out of already declining basic skills.

Between 2019 and 2024, scores in both math and reading sank three percentage points, a statistically significant drop, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP tests, often called “the Nation’s Report Card.”&�Բ�����;

Tested in the spring of 2024, just 22% of seniors were “proficient” or above in math, down from 24% in 2019. And just 35% were proficient in reading, down from 37% in 2019. Higher percentages in 2024 also scored in NAEP’s “below basic” level in both subjects.

The results, released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department, are “sobering,” said Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the . He noted “significant declines in achievement” among the lowest-performing students going back even before the pandemic. In one particularly grim indicator, a larger percentage of the Class of 2024 scored in the tests’ “below basic” level in both math and reading than in any previous assessment dating back decades.

Among other findings: 

• In math, 45% of students scored below basic, compared to 40% in 2019 and 35% in 2013;
• In reading, 32% of students were below basic, up from 30% in 2019 and 28% in 2015;
• 45% reported a “low level of interest and enjoyment” in reading, a slight improvement from 49% in 2019;
• Just 35% met NCES’s standard for being academically prepared for college, down from 37% in 2019. 

Of special concern: female students, who typically outperform their male peers in reading, saw worse results than in 2019, while male students’ reading across all achievement levels were basically flat.

The reading decline among female students aligns with previous findings about the severe toll that both the pandemic and social media have taken on adolescent girls. One found that teen girls were struggling the most relative to other groups when it comes to anxiety and depression, as well as the physical manifestations of these problems, such as headaches and stomach aches.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the and an author on the study, noted that the poor results “are coming at a terrible time, when there is zero federal effort to improve education through policy and indeed the federal government is withholding education dollars over tired culture war battles.”

‘We have not recovered from COVID’

Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research said the new results are particularly troublesome in light of the federal government’s $190 billion COVID investment in schools. Given that effort, he said, the five years between 2019 and 2024 should have brought “both sharp drops and recovery” as students lived through the pandemic and schools benefited from unprecedented investment. But except in limited cases, scores never improved.

“These results, to me, are just more confirmation that we have not recovered from COVID,” Goldhaber said. “And my guess is that some of why we haven’t recovered is because of the trends in achievement that we saw in the decade prior to the pandemic.”

Tom Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education agreed: “Something fundamental in U.S. schools is broken and we need to fix it,” he said. 

Kane theorized that among top candidates for the malaise are: absenteeism rates that have yet to return to pre-pandemic norms; reduced school system commitments to test-driven accountability, and the effects of social media.

In 2024, 31% of 12th-graders who took the tests reported missing three or more days of school in the prior month, compared to 26% who took the math tests in 2019 and 25% who took reading tests. Kane noted that has found students who miss school make instruction less effective for others when they return because they’re spending teachers’ time getting themselves caught up on what they missed.

Former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the past several administrations have squandered the power of the federal government when it comes to education policy, weakening its ability to push improvements.

“When you take your foot off the gas and stop using federal leadership, federal imperative around these performance issues, it shows up,” she said in an interview. Spellings, who now leads the , a Washington, D.C., think tank that encourages civil political discourse between parties, noted that the Every Student Succeeds Act, implemented by President Obama, was “less muscular” than No Child Left Behind, enacted under President George W. Bush and overseen by Spellings. “We know how to use the federal role in smarter ways to the benefit of kids, and we stopped doing it.”

‘Truly a five-alarm fire’

The latest NAEP tests were administered from January through March 2024, to a sampling of students in 1,500 schools nationwide, with 24,300 seniors sitting for reading tests and 19,300 for math. The tests last about an hour and are administered on laptops or tablet computers. They carry no stakes for students, who are, in some cases, just weeks from graduation. As a result, researchers have found that far fewer 12th-graders perceive that they must do well on the tests — a found that 86% of fourth-graders said it’s important, while just 35% of 12th-graders said the same.

But Kane and others said that may be a negligible factor in the poor results, since scores are as low, in many cases, as they’ve ever been. “That can’t be explained by kids just not thinking the test matters,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

Low stakes notwithstanding, USC’s Polikoff said the results are unsurprising and “no less disappointing” on that account. Seniors’ poor performance, he said, closely matches recent trends from earlier grades and has been on the decline .

Of special concern, he and others said, are the achievement declines of the lowest performing students in both math and reading — especially the unprecedented rise in students performing below basic. “That our lowest achieving students are falling so far behind is truly a five-alarm fire,” he said. 

AIR’s Goldhaber pointed out that much of the overall decline in 12th-grade scores can be attributed to sharp drops by this group. “One of the reasons that the average NAEP tests are coming down,” he said, “is because the bottom is just falling out of the distribution.”

While researchers are just beginning to get their arms around why skills are suffering at the moment, Polikoff agreed that the rise of and social media are at play, as well as declines in and “the current toxic political moment that high schoolers are probably sensitive to and that distracts from real efforts to improve schools.”

Harvard’s Kane said he’s eager to see results from research related to the recent proliferation of school mobile phone bans, but worried that, given the slow pace of academic research, the findings won’t come fast enough to make a difference. “I’m just worried that left to our own, without a concerted, coordinated effort, there’s going to be competing studies about the effect of cell phone bans and it’s going to get caught up in politics. We can’t wait for that. There needs to be a concerted effort to try to form a scientific consensus on what was the effect of the ban, in the next year or two.”

Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education and co-author of on teen disengagement, said COVID’s “ripple effects” are long-lasting, affecting many aspects of students’ lives. “If you have your first couple of years of high school where you really have very little learning happening, it’s not a surprise that you’re going to be performing much worse on your core competencies than other generations,” she said.

Winthrop and a co-author found that teens are disengaging from school “across the board,” in both public and private schools, responding to what they perceive as poor-quality instruction, irrelevant pedagogy and unsupportive environments. 

“But kids who are from higher-income families get second chances when they disengage,” Winthrop said. “Poor kids don’t.”

CRPE’s Lake said the disappointing results are “frustrating,” since she and others have been sounding the alarm for several years now “that if we don’t change course, things will be very bad — and things are very bad.”

The solutions, she said, will come from improving bedrock indicators — instruction and teacher quality, especially for struggling students, as well as ”accountability for adults in the system.”

“If there’s one thing that I’d say people should focus on, it’s the kids who are in free-fall decline,” Lake said. “It’s way more than most people think. Only the top 10% of kids are continuing to do well. All the others are declining. … We know what to do. We just need to figure out how to get it done.”

As grim as the results are, Harvard’s Kane said, they point to the ongoing importance of NAEP at a time when its future is less than certain. Just weeks after the second Trump administration took office, Department of Government Efficiency workers slashed Education Department personnel, firing NCES’s longtime director and reducing its headcount from about 100 employees to three.

But as many states loosen accountability requirements, he said, the federal testing role becomes more, not less, important. Without NAEP, he said, “we could have just coasted along” unaware of the bigger picture.

As the Trump administration works to reconfigure the Institute for Education Sciences, Kane said, “it ought to be a vehicle for answering these questions: ‘What was the effect of the cell phone bans? How do we lower absenteeism?’ And that could be done in partnership with states. But it requires a strategy. It’s not just going to happen. Somebody is going to have to decide that these are priorities and work with states to try to find the answers.”

74 Senior Writer Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

U.S. eighth graders are less prepared to be the scientists of tomorrow than they were before the pandemic. 

In the first nationwide test of students’ science knowledge since 2019, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level fell to 29%, down from 33%, and the average score dropped back to levels last seen in 2009, when a new version of the test was introduced, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Students’ confidence in the subject area has also slipped, with 28% saying they “definitely can do various science-related activities,” down from 34%. 

Performance fell across all three categories — physical, life, and earth and space sciences. Less than half of students can identify the major component of living cells, compared to 55% in 2019, and the percentage of students who can identify a characteristic of mammals declined from 72% to 68%. 

It’s not just the decline in skills that concerns science experts, it’s the dramatic decrease in their interest. The share of students saying they enjoy science activities plummeted from 52% to 42%. 

“If you’re not interested, it’s hard to learn,” said Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM learning at the Museum of Science in Boston and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. Students were also less likely than in 2019 to say they engage in tasks like designing research questions, debating scientific ideas and conducting experiments to explain why something happens. “As someone who works a lot with students or with teachers who do that kind of inquiry, that’s why students get excited.”&�Բ�����;

COVID-era school closures derailed student learning in all areas, but science was hit especially hard as teachers tried to keep kids on track in reading and math. A from the Public Policy Institute of California showed that only about a quarter of districts emphasized science in their recovery efforts. Teachers were more likely to assign free online lessons and let students work at their own pace, compared with a typical school year. Widespread declines in reading performance have also hampered students’ ability to keep up in science at a time when technology is rapidly evolving. 

“Science is such a hands-on experience, and trying to find ways to bring that to different homes was challenging,” said Autumn Rivera, a sixth grade science teacher in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, west of Denver. “Eleven- and 12-year-olds really need a lot of activity.”

She got families involved in “kitchen chemistry,” asked students to and recorded videos of lessons to discuss with students on Zoom. One of their favorite experiments was studying the water cycle by hanging a plastic bag full of water in a sunny window. 

In the spring of 2021, , students had missed out on at least two months of science learning. By 2024, science achievement in third to fifth grade had returned to 2019 levels, but seventh and eighth graders, across all racial groups, saw the most significant declines and were still more than three months behind pre-pandemic performance.

One former education secretary warned against using COVID “as an excuse.” Margaret Spellings, who led the department during George W. Bush’s administration, noted that as with students’ achievement in other subject areas, performance in science did not improve between 2015 and 2019. Average scores for eighth and 12th graders were flat and declined for fourth graders.

A positive trend, Cunningham said, is that more elementary schools have added STEM as part of an elective rotation with art and music. Those classes can be highly engaging, but aren’t always focused on grade-level standards, she said. In addition, regular classroom teachers might scale back science lessons and focus more on reading and math. 

High and low performers

The declines in achievement were not confined to a few student groups. They affected students whether or not they live in the suburbs, come from wealthier homes or have parents who graduated from college. Students without disabilities and who speak English as a first language also scored lower than in 2019. 

But Matt Soldner, acting NCES commissioner, pointed out what he considers the one encouraging sign from the results  — a 6-point increase in scores for English learners. 

“NAEP describes the what, not the why,” he said, “but that’s an interesting subgroup finding.”

As with other NAEP assessments, the science results show a widening gap between students scoring at the highest and lowest levels. Scores for students in the 90th percentile dropped from 196 to 194, but fell further, from 106 to 101, for students at the 10th percentile.  In fact, for students at both the 10th and 25th percentiles, scores are at “historic lows,” said Soldner. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted focused action to accelerate student learning.”

Julia Rafal-Baer, co-founder of ILO Group, an education consulting firm, and also a member of the governing board, said access to books likely contributes to the disparities in scores. If science wasn’t a high priority in some schools, “how is it that high-performing kids are still absorbing enough to be able to be high-performing?” she asked.

Many students, Rivera said, lack the reading skills to interpret science texts. 

“I’m having to take a step back and really focus on basic reading … which is not something  that I am technically trained in as a sixth grade teacher,” she said. Like many teachers, she also sees families place less emphasis on consistent attendance and good work habits. “We’re seeing students missing work. We’re not really seeing … emphasis placed on school or on achievement.”

Poor basic math skills are also hindering students’ progress in science, said Cunningham, who designs STEM curriculum materials for schools across the country.

“Teachers are spending more time making sure that the kids are prepared to do some of the things that in the past they may have assumed kids would come equipped to do,” she said. “Could they make a table? Could they make a graph?”

On NAEP, the percentage of students saying they frequently “used tables or graphs to identify relationships between variables” fell from 43% to 39%. Less than a third “used math equations to explain or support scientific conclusions.”

‘Starving ourselves of knowledge’

NAEP will assess students’ reading and math skills again in 2026, but the next won’t take place until 2028, again just for eighth grade. Students will take that includes a stronger emphasis on students applying their knowledge and will incorporate more technology and engineering topics. 

Because so many students — at least a third — score below basic, Cunningham added that the board felt it was important to expand the number of questions targeting students at that level.  

“We need to know more about what that population knows,” she said. The questions, for example, might be simpler and require less reading.

Fourth graders were left out of the 2024 and 2028 science tests for budget reasons, Cunningham said. They’re scheduled to participate again in 2032. But one former governing board member said the absence of data from fourth graders is troubling.

“If there had to be a cut, I understand why we would, but it still raises the question of what we expect in science in early grades,” said Andrew Ho, a testing expert and education professor at Harvard University. “Why are we starving ourselves of knowledge about educational progress outside of [English language arts and math]?”

Staff cuts to NCES of the results, which were expected earlier this summer. 

During a background call with reporters last week, a member of the governing board said the results were “an opportunity for the field to see that these report cards are of the same quality that they have come to expect from the NAEP program.” But an NCES official on the same call said that in light of Education Secretary Linda McMahon firing most of the center’s employees, the department will need “sufficient staff and other resources in place” to conduct the tests next year and plan for 2028.

McMahon reiterated her support for the NAEP program during a .

“If we have an objective measure across all states, like NAEP, then I think that’s the best way to go,” she said. “We will not get away from having NAEP scores and the research that we can all rely on to make sure that we’re doing the right things.”&�Բ�����; 

‘AI-driven world’

Beverly DeVore-Wedding, president of the National Science Teaching Association, still worries that the “current political climate” will diminish the program. 

“I am concerned about them changing the assessment picture and that NAEP could get reduced to only reading and mathematics,” she said. 

The science results also have implications for other aspects of President Donald Trump’s agenda, such as incorporating artificial intelligence into learning. Last week, first lady Melania Trump hosted an event tied to the for students to use AI to address community challenges. 

“It’s not one of those things to be afraid of,” McMahon said at the event. “Let’s embrace it. Let’s develop AI-based solutions to real-world problems.”

Rafal-Baer said the rapid adoption of AI tools just reinforces the importance of science education.

“AI is here and it’s already reshaping how we work, learn and solve problems,” she said.  “The complexity is only going to accelerate, and we can’t afford to have a scientifically illiterate workforce trying to navigate an AI-driven world.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated whether the 8th grade NAEP science exam gathers supplemental data on students’ home environments or reading habits.

Congratulations and welcome to a place we once knew well. You face any number of tough challenges on behalf of American students, parents, educators and taxpayers, as well as the administration you serve, but your “Department’s Final Mission” shows that you’re well prepared to meet them. We particularly admire your commitment to making American education “the greatest in the world.”

But how will we — and you, and our fellow Americans — know how rapidly we’re getting there? By now, you’re probably aware that the single most important activity of the department you lead is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known to some as NAEP and to many as the Nation’s Report Card.

That’s the primary gauge by which we know how American education is doing, both nationally and in the states to which you rightly seek to restore its control.

Almost four decades ago — during Ronald Reagan’s second term — it was our job to modernize that key barometer of student achievement. Five years after A Nation at Risk told Americans that their education system was far from the world’s greatest, state leaders — governors especially — craved better data on the performance of their students and schools. And they were right. At the time, they had no sure way of monitoring that performance.

That was one of our challenges, back in the day. Advised by a blue-ribbon study group led by outgoing Tennessee governor (and future U.S. senator) Lamar Alexander, and with congressional cooperation spearheaded by the late Ted Kennedy, in 1988 we proposed what became a bipartisan transformation of an occasional government-sponsored test into a regular and systematic appraisal of student achievement in core academic subjects, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (part of your Institute for Education Sciences) and overseen by an independent group of state and local leaders, plus educators and the general public. (One of your responsibilities is appointing several terrific people each year to terms on the 26-member National Assessment Governing Board.) 

That 1988 overhaul made three big changes:

• Creation of that independent board to ensure the data’s integrity, accuracy and utility;
  
• Inauguration of state-level reporting of student achievement in grades 4, 8 and 12, i.e. at  the ends of elementary, middle and high school; and
  
• Authorization for the board to set standards — known as achievement levels — by which to know whether that achievement is satisfactory.

Much else was happening in U.S. education at the time: School choice was gaining traction. States were setting their own academic standards and administering their own assessments. Graduation requirements were rising as the economy modernized and its human capital needs increased. 

As these and other reforms gathered speed, NAEP became the country’s most trusted barometer of what was (and wasn’t) working. You alluded to NAEP data during your confirmation hearing. President Donald Trump deploys it when referencing the shortcomings of U.S. schools. For example, his Jan. 29 executive order on school choice began this way: “According to this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 70% of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72% were below proficient in math.”

Everybody relies on NAEP data, and its governing board’s standards have become the criteria by which states gauge whether their own standards are rigorous enough. Just the other day, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s board of education used them to benchmark Virginia’s tougher expectations for students and .

Reading and math were, and remain, at the heart of NAEP, but today it also tests civics, U.S. history, science and other core subjects — exactly as listed in your speech.

But NAEP is not perfect. It needs another careful modernization. It should make far better use of technology, including artificial intelligence. It should be nimbler and more efficient. The procedures by which its contractors are engaged need overhauling. (The Education Department’s whole procurement process needs that, too — faster, more competitive, more efficient, less expensive!)

Yet NAEP also needs to do more. Today, for instance, it gives state leaders their results only in grades 4 and 8, not at the end of high school. It doesn’t test civics and history nearly often enough, and never in 12^th grade, even though most systematic study of those subjects occurs in high school. (It probably tests fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math too often — the result of a different federal law.) 

Doing more shouldn’t cost any more. Within NAEP’s current budget — approaching $200 million, a drop in the department’s murky fiscal ocean — much more data should be gettable by making new contracts tighter and technology smarter, squeezing more analysis from NAEP’s vast trove and having staffers put shoulders to the wheel. (Former IES director Mark Schneider has the .)  But making this happen will take strong executive leadership, an agile, hardworking governing board and your own oversight. You may decide it’s time for another blue-ribbon group to take a close look at NAEP and recommend how to modernize it again without losing its vital ability to monitor changes over time in student achievement.

Yes, this is all sort of wonky. NAEP results get used all the time, but it’s far down in the bureaucracy and doesn’t make much noise. Nobody in Congress (as far as we know) pays it much attention. Yet it remains — we believe — the single most important activity of your department. Which, frankly, is why it needs your watchful attention! 

We wish you well in your new role. Please let us know if we can help in any way.

Sincerely, 

William J. Bennett, U.S. Secretary of Education (1985-88)

Chester E. Finn Jr., Assistant Secretary for Research & Improvement and Counselor to the Secretary (1985-88) 

Those findings emerge out of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Amid an otherwise-disastrous release of fourth- and eighth-grade scores last month, experts hailed the emergence of a new hierarchy of educational excellence that largely runs through the South.

There’s a catch, however: That revised national leaderboard is visible only after researchers account for the wide variety of student populations in each state. to the 2024 NAEP were produced by the left-leaning Urban Institute, which has long applied statistical controls to scores in an attempt to develop a more precise understanding of how well schools are teaching children. 

At the heart of the effort is an acknowledgment that student demographics are not evenly sorted across state borders. Black students live across the Deep South, while English language learners are to be found near the Mexican border. Perhaps most prominently, rates of child poverty below the Mason-Dixon line than above. Higher or lower concentrations of these student groups, which have all historically posted lower NAEP scores, can heavily sway states’ performance in ways that may not accurately represent the quality of their schools and teachers, said Matthew Chingos, Urban’s vice president for education. 

Adjusting for demographic traits produces “more of an apples-to-apples comparison” between different parts of the country, he added.

“If you want to go to a random state, ask a fourth-grader a math question, and have the highest chance of them getting it right, you’ll probably be fine going to the place with the most white, high-income kids,” Chingos said. “But if you want to randomly place a kid in the state where he’ll learn the most, then this list is a better approximation of that.”

To reach that approximation, Chingos and co-author Kristin Blagg used NAEP’s national data to compare test takers in each state directly against those of the same age, gender, race, socioeconomic background, special education status, and English language learner designation. These calculations effectively simulate a world in which Hispanic students, for example, are as plentiful in Maine as in Arizona. 

The consequent shifts are surprising. 

In NAEP’s raw (statistically unweighted) scores for fourth-grade math, the one subject in which American students made significant gains over the last two years, the top 10 states were Massachusetts, Florida, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, Texas, and New Jersey. But only four of those (Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Indiana) remained among the top 10 in Urban’s estimates. Strikingly, New Hampshire and North Dakota actually fell to the 11th- and 12th-worst in the country after controlling for demographics. 

Inter-state contrasts can be even more stark. New Jersey eighth graders earned an average reading score of 266 second-best in the U.S.), while their peers in Arkansas scored 255 (tied for tenth from the bottom). In Chingos and Blagg’s report, however, the two states are nearly identical.

Among all states, Urban measured Mississippi — which underwent a much-celebrated academic revival over the past decade — as receiving the highest adjusted scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math, as well as fourth-grade reading. It nearly grabbed the top spot in eighth-grade reading for good measure, finishing just behind Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Georgia. A (illustrated and by education advocate Marc Porter Magee) also placed Texas, Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, and Kentucky among the top states after averaging all four age/subject combinations.

Carrie Conaway, a senior lecturer at Harvard who previously served as chief research officer at Massachusetts’s state education agency, said that both raw and adjusted scores provide an important lens on the true extent of learning. But when local leaders want to benchmark their results against other states’, she added, Urban’s release is “the only way to do it.”

“It’s not that one measurement is better than the other, it’s that each question comes with a different set of assumptions and conclusions you could draw,” Conaway said. “But I do think that more people are interested in the question of whose system is the best, independent of demographics.”

A matter of perspective

The unavoidable reality is that states must educate the students who actually enroll in their schools. No amount of empirical maneuvering will change those headline numbers.

Yet Urban’s alternative perspective undoubtedly reflects some authentic improvements in school outcomes. Not only did the adjusted scores for Louisiana rank second only to Mississippi, the state also saw some of the fastest-growing raw scores on the 2024 round of NAEP — including the only significant ascent in elementary literacy anywhere in the United States since 2019.

Those strides have accompanied the implementation of of reading instruction that was consciously modeled after strategies first adopted by Mississippi. But it is difficult to identify which factors led directly to better achievement, Chingos said, arguing that any theories about how learning gains were accomplished would have to allow for the fact that states “have done a whole bunch of things over a long period of time.”

“In Florida, was it the , the , or something else? In Massachusetts, was it or the ? You seldom see a clean story like in Mississippi, where they did a big overhaul of reading instruction, and they saw reading scores go way up,” he said.

Some also question the importance of rankings themselves. Derek Briggs, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in student evaluation, said that he was more interested in examining the rise or fall of scores over time rather than states’ comparative positioning on a list. Adjustments like Urban’s have value as a way of delving into the results of a one-time exam, he continued, but they are ultimately less useful in the context of NAEP, which tracks each state’s performance going back to the 1970s.

“If the perspective you’re taking is to look at trends and change over time, then in some sense, it doesn’t matter that certain states begin in different positions,” said Briggs. “Yes, you can see that the states are in different spots in the original year, but what you really want to focus on is the change.”&�Բ�����;

Chingos conceded that top-down ordering is “always a little weird,” particularly in the middle of the rankings, because changes of just a point or two in either direction can meaningfully alter how states perceive and present themselves. While he and his colleagues try to communicate the complex ways in which academic reality can be obscured by demographics, the response of state leaders is typically more predictable.

“The states that get adjusted up love this,” he said. “The states that get adjusted down ignore it.”

‘We take seriously our role as leaders’

Few will have the option of ignoring the decline in student learning over the last decade, which worsened dramatically during the COVID era. According to a district-level study of the NAEP results conducted by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, just 6 percent of American students live in school districts where math and reading levels are higher than they were in 2019. And in areas with large numbers of minority and low-income students.

With the from Washington, states are attempting to launch an academic recovery that will accelerate growth for the kinds of student populations that feature prominently in the Urban Institute’s analysis. While their paths to improvement may not be easy to emulate, top-scoring states provide a model for stragglers. 

John White served as Louisiana’s superintendent of education between 2012 and 2020, when local schools — historically some of the lowest-performing in the country — . In an interview, he said he believed that states like Louisiana were able to reach disadvantaged student populations through assertive K–12 oversight led by governors, legislatures and state education agencies. Many others embodied a more “passive” approach that largely centered on dispensing resources to schools and districts, he argued.

“If you look at the states at the top of the Urban Institute list, you would have to say that it’s almost synonymous with those that have said, ‘We take seriously our role as leaders of classroom- and school-level change, and we don’t see ourselves just as rule makers and check writers,’” White observed.

While significant differences exist among successful school systems, White said, the unifying element is usually a leadership class that willingly embraces its role as a guarantor of student success. Those responsibilities extend to the selection of high-quality curricula, the provision of teacher training in domains like the science of reading, and the maintenance of high standards and accountability for schools and teachers. 

In a recent essay, literacy advocate Karen Vaites Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama as beacons of reading growth for the rest of the country to follow. White agreed the region has gained momentum in recent years, adding that the “golden age” of education reform was by Southern governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, and the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida. Along with strong state leadership, he said, particular features like unelected state superintendents and county-level school districts likely explain some of their progress. 

To policymakers in states that have struggled to boost student success, and particularly those whose NAEP scores fall after demographic adjustments, he recommended that the challenge be “taken seriously.”

“If you’re the state chief in a place like that, the question in front of you is how to use the tools you have to systematize a long-term approach to change,” he concluded. “I don’t see any evidence — and Massachusetts has proven so for decades — that you can’t systematize improvement over multiple years.”

But that era ended abruptly Monday when the U.S. Department of Education put Carr, who has worked across both Republican and Democratic administrations, on paid leave. A department spokeswoman cited the fact that Biden appointed Carr to the position. Carr’s term was set to expire in 2027.

“I’m still processing and have no words to share right now. It’s a lot to take in,” Carr said in an email, declining to answer further questions. 

The move, coming less than a week after officials canceled an upcoming math and reading test for 17 year olds, raises questions about the future of the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Carr earned respect from both sides of the aisle with her ability to present the results — both promising and discouraging — in an objective way. Some former officials say the decision to put her on leave reflects President Donald Trump’s desire to streamline NAEP. But others say losing her expertise at a time when student performance still hasn’t recovered from the pandemic could compromise the integrity of the assessment program.

“Without knowledgeable decision makers like Peggy Carr, it is likely that the scientific quality of NAEP, and other important data collections, will be eroded,” said Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy. He added that political interpretations of the data could undermine public trust in the assessment’s value. “Today, schools and states must face up to the reality of their performance. If given the chance, some states will argue that their poor performance is just a matter of poor data — allowing them to avoid addressing any performance problems.”

Andrew Ho, a Harvard University assessment expert and also a former board member, called Carr an “institution” and “truth teller” who presented testing results in a nonpartisan way.

But others say politics had nothing to do with the decision to let Carr go. 

Mark Schneider, a Trump appointee who stepped down last March as director of the Institute for Education Sciences, which includes NCES and NAEP, said the program’s increasing costs during Carr’s tenure were out of step with an administration determined to cut spending. 

“NAEP is going to take a haircut. I don’t think there’s a question about that,” said Schneider, Carr’s former supervisor and NCES commissioner under George W. Bush. “The question is ‘How do you prioritize what it does in a harsh fiscal environment?’ ”

He argued that canceling the long-term trend test for 17 year olds is just the first step toward making NAEP, which costs $192 million, a leaner operation that concentrates on math and reading. 

“We’ve been doing main NAEP since the 1990s. Why do we need long-term trend tests?” he asked. “NAEP has grown and grown and grown, and from my perspective, it’s way too expensive.”

‘Did a lot of homework’

Carr began her long career with the federal government as a chief statistician in the Office for Civil Rights before moving to NCES in 1993. For over 20 years, she served as associate commissioner for assessment and has long translated NAEP and international assessment results for reporters, educators and policymakers. 

“She did a lot of homework preparing and rehearsing for presentations of NAEP results, so that she knew the results thoroughly and could answer any questions,” said Andrew Kolstad, who served as her senior technical adviser in the 1990s. “People in the department and in the testing industry called on her for her experience.”

Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former chair of the board, said Carr won his respect for “meticulously” fact-checking his , Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP.

She offered a number of critical judgments “without ever once trying to compromise my authorial integrity or get in my face,” he said. “In her day job, she’s been superb at explaining and interpreting NAEP data without spinning it or crossing the line into causation.”

When students took the first NAEP tests after COVID school closures, Carr wanted to brace the public for sharp declines. In an exclusive interview with ����Ӱ�� in 2022, she said that while scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math were already falling prior to the pandemic, “it’s more than likely we’re going to see the bottom drop even more.”

While some former commissioners served under only one president, others worked through transitions to new administrations. Carr served as acting commissioner under President Barack Obama and Trump until the latter appointed Lynn Woodworth. Under Biden, Woodworth stayed on until the end of his term in 2021. 

Carr wasn’t alone in asking for more resources for NCES, which collects and analyzes data on all aspects of education, including enrollment trends and the state of the teacher workforce. During his tenure Woodworth pushed for more and equipment, rather than contracting with outside agencies, but said his requests were always denied.

Schneider applauded Carr for driving the requirement under No Child Left Behind to administer the core NAEP math and reading tests every two years. The law required states to participate to receive federal funds. 

​​”Someone had to turn NAEP into that machine to deliver on a regular basis data required by law,” he said. “She deserves all the credit in the world for that.”

Carr also led the transition to a in 2018 and to of students’ answers in 2022. But Schneider, who has indicated he wouldn’t rule out returning to his former position, said the program hasn’t kept up with “modern data-collection techniques.”

He’d prefer the next commissioner to have state-level experience and to be more “critical of these big research houses” like ETS, which has held NAEP contracts for roughly 40 years and just won in January. 

“The challenge for NAEP, and more broadly for NCES,” Schneider said, “is modernization — creating new data systems that are faster, cheaper, better.”

One of three long-term studies that has measured student performance in math and reading since the 1970s, the assessment was set to begin in March and run through May.

But Westat, a research organization handling the assessment for the National Center for Education Statistics, notified state officials Wednesday that the department had canceled the test.

“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in the email, which was shared with ����Ӱ��. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”

A long-term trend assessment of 13 year olds was conducted last fall. The age 9 administration is currently underway through March 14 and will continue. Age 17 data, however, hasn’t been collected since 2012, creating a significant gap in understanding older students’ academic performance.

The tests, which are mandated , were set to be administered during the 2019-20 school year, but were canceled due to the COVID outbtreak. 

This year’s data would have set a new baseline for understanding how older students are recovering “from pandemic-era learning losses,” said Andrew Ho, an assessment expert at Harvard University and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. 

The cancellation, he said, could undermine the nation’s trust in the assessment program. 

“This is just the first direct evidence that executive actions have weakened NAEP and its ‘gold standard’ infrastructure for monitoring educational progress.”&�Բ�����;

Every two years, NAEP tests fourth and eighth graders in math and reading. While results from 12th graders, collected last year, are expected this summer, they won’t be tested again until 2028.

“NAEP’s biggest gaps already are at the end of high school, telling us what kids do [or] don’t know and can [or] can’t do as they prepare to enter the real world,” said Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former chair of the board. The long-term trend study has “helped fill the gap.”&�Բ�����;

The move contradicts what department officials said last week when they canceled nearly $900 million in contracts for the Institute of Education Sciences, which includes NCES and NAEP. Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, said at the time that work related to NAEP . 

But Elon Musk’s continues to cancel contracts it deems either wasteful or contrary to President Donald Trump’s executive order related to diversity, equity and inclusion. 

The fact that the test was not administered in 2016 or 2020 “does not make it a very effective longitudinal study,” Biedermann told ����Ӱ�� Thursday. She did not indicate whether it would be rescheduled.

The department has also canceled a contract for conducting background checks on field staff who administer NAEP tests in schools. Biedermann did not provide details on the vendor or the amount of the contract.

“We’re going to try to re-scope and re-evaluate these contracts,” she said. If they are “absolutely necessary,” they will be re-bid, she said. “A lot of these contracts, in our evaluation, are not cost effective and not meeting the standards.”&�Բ�����;

Biedermann maintained that the core NAEP program in fourth and eighth grade reading and math “is not being touched.”&�Բ�����;

Results released last month showed that students continue to lose ground in reading. Eighth grade results in math were flat, and while fourth graders saw gains in math, those results were driven by the highest-performing students.

The long-term trend program is different from the primary NAEP assessment because it has tested students on essentially the same items for over 50 years. 

“It’s important that we have the long-term trend because of the consistency of the test,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research. Measuring performance on the same test items allows officials to monitor changes across generations.

He added that at least the results from 12th graders, collected last year, will provide “information about how kids are doing at the end of high school.” 

The 74’s Senior Writer Greg Toppo contributed to this report.

Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K–12 schools. 

This week’s update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with “the tsunami following the earthquake” — a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Kane said. “But no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.”&�Բ�����;

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3–8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores — about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 — represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that “there were higher-impact ways to use the dollars” to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,” she said. “ESSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study “devastating.

“We already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,” he wrote in an email.

‘Two kinds of bad news’

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,” Reardon said. “One is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.”

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the “new normal.” If he’d been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

“I think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,” Goodman recalled. “I don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington’s relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn’t come close to reversing the full extent of COVID’s damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER’s final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure — just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds — states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement — meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

“This is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,” Kane argued. “We just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K–12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn’t serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts’ budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,” Sibilia said. “But I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.”

Newly released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, show that both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading — not just compared with the status quo of 2019, but also the most recent round of the exam, which was conducted during the heart of the pandemic. Math scores were flat for eighth graders and up slightly for fourth graders, but those gains were predominantly driven by the progress of high-performing students. 

The alarming results are in keeping with those revealed by earlier iterations of NAEP and highlight decade-long trends of both stagnation in overall academic growth and growing disparities between top students and their struggling classmates.

Jane Swift was the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 2001 to 2003 and now serves on the , the nonpartisan entity that oversees NAEP. In an interview, she expressed frustration that the country is still “stuck where we were” two years ago. 

“Everybody is tired of hearing about the pandemic,” Swift said. “This is not an issue that is driven solely by the pandemic. Looking at this data, it’s clear that we’re in enormous risk of losing an entire generation of learners unless we show some focus and leadership.”

The highest-achieving test takers continued to pull away, or at least hold steady, while lower-performing children lost yet more ground. In fourth-grade reading, only participants testing at the 90th percentile staved off a drop in scores; those at the 50th percentile fell by two points, and those at the 10th percentile experienced a four-point slip. In eighth-grade math, scores at the 90th percentile jumped by three points since 2022, while those at the 10th percentile fell by five points. 

Another notable divergence opened up on ethnic lines. While eighth graders from most demographic groups were statistically unchanged in reading over the last two years, Hispanic students fell dramatically: by five points on average, by eight points for those at the 25th percentile, and by three points even for better-than-average participants at the 75th percentile. 

In all, about two-thirds of eighth graders exceeded NAEP’s “Basic” level of achievement in reading, fewer than did so in 1992. Thirty-three percent of students about to head into high school placed below the Basic threshold, the most in the history of the exam. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, a NAGB member and education consultant who was previously the assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, said K–12 policymakers had to acknowledge the persistent failure to alter the trajectories of low-performing students.

“If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Rafal-Baer said. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”

Some hopeful signs in math

Even with the abundance of bad news, some positive signs indicated the beginnings of a turnaround in math learning. 

Fourth graders climbed upwards by two points in the subject over the last two years, after dropping by five points between 2019 and 2022. While falling somewhat short of a major stride — again, higher-scoring students enjoyed significant gains, while those at the bottom of the distribution did not — it marks the first sign of post-pandemic progress on NAEP.

Bob Hughes, director of American K–12 education programs at the , said that while it was critical to track year-to-year fluctuations in math scores, national leaders in government and philanthropy needed to focus more on the broader development of better tools and strategies to deliver math instruction. Compared with the decade-long coalescence of educators around the science of reading, which has taken hold in dozens of states around the country, no similar consensus exists for math, he argued.

Further, he added, a host of technological applications and tutoring models has continuously evolved since the emergence of COVID. While the best classroom use of such innovations is still to be discovered, Hughes described himself as bullish on their long-term prospects.

“I don’t think the technology is positioned now to be a magic bullet in solving some of the challenges we see on NAEP,” Hughes said. “But there are some promising developments that, over time, should help us accelerate achievement amongst even students that are the farthest from standard.”

Among results for individual states and school districts, often closely watched for exceptions to national or regional trends, comparatively few distinctions were in evidence. Fifteen states, mostly clustered in the Northeast and South, enjoyed a significant bounce in fourth-grade math compared with 2022 (Nebraska was the sole state in which scores declined over the last two years); still, only Alabama elementary schoolers are now farther along in the subject than similarly aged students in 2019. 

Another exception was Louisiana, the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher than in 2019. Notably, the state’s scores in fourth-grade math were also higher than in 2019, though not by a statistically significant amount. Local losses in eighth-grade math and reading were among the smallest of any state.

John White, who served as Louisiana’s superintendent of schools from 2012 to 2020, said the state’s progress was due to a long-running emphasis on the improvement of curricular materials and strong accountability.

“There have been changes to rules and programs over time,” he said, “but the essence of the plan remains constant: select evidence-backed curricula, build teachers’ skill every day on the practices needed for those curricula, and be transparent about the results schools achieve.”

White added that the “jarring” results for the nation as a whole could not all be attributed to the hangover of COVID learning loss, and that education leaders have to arrive at a better understanding of how to improve them.

“We have to look deep within the test results themselves, and across a broad range of factors inside and outside of schools, to come to a stronger hypothesis than we have today,” he concluded. “That should be a national priority, and if national leaders don’t lead it, prominent state and city leaders should.”

Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” fell by a jarring eight points since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points; both are the largest math declines ever recorded on the test. In reading, both fourth- and eighth-grade scores fell by three points, leaving them statistically unchanged since 1992, when NAEP was first rolled out. 

The findings comport with those of previous assessments of students’ COVID-era achievement, whether conducted by academic researchers or state and district authorities, which have shown undeniable evidence of diminished performance in English and especially math. Just a few months ago, the release of scores for 9-year-olds on NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” assessment — a different exam measuring today’s students against a baseline set in the early 1970s — offered similarly ominous results.

Even still, the education world has waited nervously for the unveiling of today’s data, perhaps the most important federal scores to appear since the pandemic began. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that while relative stability in reading scores across some of the nation’s largest districts offered a few “bright spots … amidst all the chaos of the pandemic,” the unprecedented reversals in math should spark serious concern.

“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Carr said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”

A look at the results in their entirety show just how significant. There were no statistically significant gains in math, for either fourth or eighth graders, in any state in 2022. Instead, fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in 43 jurisdictions (either the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity) while remaining statistically unchanged in 10. Eighth-grade math fell in 51 jurisdictions while holding steady in just two, Utah and the DoDEA schools. The average eighth-grade score has not only fallen since 2019 — it is significantly lower than when the test was administered in 2003.

Translated into the exam’s performance levels, a massive downward shift can be seen. In 2019, 34% of fourth graders and 27% of eighth graders scored below the “NAEP Basic” level in reading — the most rudimentary threshold of English mastery classified by the test. In 2022, those groups had grown to 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders, respectively. The below-basic classification also swelled in math, from 19% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders in 2019 to 25% of fourth graders and 38% of eighth graders in 2022.

Beneath the headline numbers, differing effects among student groups also made an impact on longstanding achievement gaps. For example, gaps expanded in fourth-grade math performance between white and African-American students, white and Hispanic students, male and female students, and students with and without disabilities. Conversely, gaps actually closed between many of the same groups in eighth-grade reading — including by a surprising seven points between English learners and native English speakers. 

Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has studied the effects of COVID and remote learning on student achievement, said that trends in NAEP scores were dynamic and varied, making them difficult to distill. Big-picture phenomena, however, broadly lined up with the existing evidence, she argued.

“Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”

Julia Rafal-Baer is a K-12 education expert who serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, a nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP. In a statement, she said the results demonstrated the existence of “an education crisis” that demanded new solutions.

“The latest data isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know,” Rafal-Baer wrote in an email. “COVID was exceptionally disruptive, and we’re running out of time to ensure that kids can indeed recover from this level of unfinished learning.”

State-by-state comparisons difficult

No state could be said to have defied the downward pressure exerted by the pandemic and its countless challenges to learning. But the national averages do conceal substantial variation across different areas of the country. 

Some of the states where scores dropped the furthest, for example, were clustered in the mid-Atlantic region. Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various grade/subject combinations.

By contrast, a small group of states seemed to weather COVID reasonably well, experiencing less severe declines than most. Overall, while performance in eighth-grade math was weakened virtually everywhere, 10 jurisdictions, including Georgia and Wisconsin, saw no statistically significant decline in fourth-grade math. Another 22 were able to stave off declines in fourth-grade reading, while 18 did so in eighth-grade reading. 

A small number of states — Alabama, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa and Louisiana — kept scores from significantly falling in three out of four grade/subject combinations. Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019. 

The differences between states will naturally raise questions about the procedures they followed to offer schooling during the pandemic. Among the states that saw the largest score declines, many stuck with remote learning far into the 2020-21 school year as a precaution against COVID spread. 

Oster, whose previous research has found that longer periods of remote instruction were linked with more severe learning loss, called the results “very consistent with what we’ve seen in state-level data, which suggests that places that had the most in-person learning lost less than the places that had more virtual learning.” Even so, she added, a state like California — where she would have expected student scores to fall especially dramatically based on that correlation — instead saw more modest declines.

NCES’s Carr argued that the release provided little scope for comparisons between states, since so many jurisdictions experienced “massive, comprehensive declines.”

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” she said. “Let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different across the United States — the quality, all the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning. It is extremely complex.”&�Բ�����;

Megan Kuhfeld, a researcher at the nonprofit testing organization NWEA, said that the average NAEP effects dovetailed with her own expectations based on of post-pandemic learning loss. That said, she agreed with Carr that the huge diversity of COVID learning policies — where neighboring school districts sometimes took radically different approaches — made direct comparisons difficult.

“ has supported the idea that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps, but I think it is harder to make that sort of inference at the state level because district reopening policies often varied widely within states,” Kuhfeld wrote in an email.

Urban districts fared better in reading 

If a silver lining exists within the release, it comes from some of America’s biggest cities.

In addition to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 26 urban school districts around the country participate in NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment program. The measure offers a unique look inside districts that collectively enroll millions of students and were subject to substantially different state-level public health policies.

Disappointingly, math results in these districts were no better than elsewhere: Fourth-grade and eighth-grade scores alike sank by eight points on average, matching or surpassing the declines for the nation as a whole. 

Performance in English, however, offered somewhat sunnier news: Average scores in reading held up in 17 cities, falling in just nine. Fully 21 of the 26 urban districts managed the same in eighth-grade reading, with only Shelby County, Tennessee; Jefferson County, Kentucky; Guilford County, North Carolina; and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing statistically significant drops. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, eighth-grade reading performance even improved. 

Michael Petrilli, who leads reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, nevertheless took a dark view of the overall NAEP outcomes. 

“There’s no sugar coating these awful results,” Petrilli said. “Save for Los Angeles (which I honestly cannot explain), the only question is whether states and localities did bad or worse. These data tell us how big a hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Now it’s up to all of us to dig ourselves — and our students — out.” 

Others took a somewhat more hopeful outlook. Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the urban districts’ results provided “a glimmer of hope in these otherwise dismal data.” Moreover, he added, both the NAEP data and state standardized test scores have already shown evidence that student achievement is bouncing back from its pandemic nadir.

Going forward, Loveless observed, state and school district leaders will likely view this round of scores as a kind of new student performance baseline. That could provide an accountability mechanism if things don’t improve.

“I think 2021 was probably the bottom, and we’re getting little shards of progress in these NAEP data,” he said. “But I’m expecting [the 2024 NAEP results] to look quite a bit better, and the state tests, too. If they don’t, I think people will start raising harsh questions.”

The results of the benchmark federal exam, referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed startling declines in student performance, including the first-ever drop in long-term math scores. Nine-year-olds, who have made steady progress since the test was first administered in the early 1970s, saw roughly twenty years of measured growth evaporate between 2020 and 2022. 

Using the results of state standardized tests, as well as private assessments like the MAP or iReady exams, a growing cadre of academics have offered evidence of K-12 learning deficits produced COVID’s disruption to school operations — including signs that Democratic-leaning states and districts, which were more likely to close schools longer, saw less instruction and steeper hits to achievement. But NAEP provides the first nationally representative data confirming those suspicions and charting the diverging effects on distinct student groups.

While average math and English scores fell for virtually all students, historically disadvantaged children — among them African Americans, Hispanics, the poor, and academically struggling students — generally saw larger drops, widening the gaps with their higher-scoring peers. 

Martin West is the academic dean and Henry Less Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent, nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP, he also has a unique perspective on the test and the data it generates.

In an email exchange Thursday with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, West spoke about the results, the possibility of growing educational inequity as a result of the pandemic, and public perception of schools in its wake. Asked whether the steep drop in performance could be remedied with time and more resources, his answer was stark.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before,” West said.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: The public reaction to these results has been huge — almost surprisingly so, given that prior studies have indicated significant learning deficits resulting from the pandemic. Do you think NAEP’s role as the authoritative national exam just makes these trends un-ignorable?

Martin West: It has certainly been gratifying, as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to see the strong reaction to the results. And I do think that reaction speaks to NAEP’s reputation as the authoritative source for tracking the achievement of American students over time. The NAEP Long-Term Trend, in particular, has remained essentially unchanged for more than fifty years. NAEP assessments are also the only tests that are routinely administered to samples that are truly representative of the nation as a whole. I think the latter factor in particular helps explain why NAEP results garner so much national media coverage. Reports based on state tests are inherently local stories. Reports based on interim assessment data leave room for doubts about whether they are truly representative. NAEP releases are national stories.

Do you think the steady trickle of bad news, whether from NAEP or other tests, is related to the diminished perceptions of public schools found in the EdNext poll, among others?

I think it is impossible to separate the role bad news about test scores has played in shaping public perceptions from the role played by factors like prolonged school closures that caused test scores to decline in the first place. So the bad news is definitely related to the diminished perceptions of school quality, but I don’t think we can say for sure that it has an independent effect.

It sounds pretty bad for students to be scoring at levels that were last seen 20 or more years ago. But what should we expect in terms of bounce-back achievement now that schools are essentially all offering in-person learning? In other words, while this is a very sharp one-time decline, is it likely to reset the learning trajectory for millions of kids permanently?

The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before. Recent reports based on interim assessments suggest that, as students resumed in-person instruction, they have generally demonstrated rates of achievement growth that were typical before the pandemic. That is encouraging as far as it goes, but it would not be enough to help the students whose educations have been disrupted return to where they would have been absent the pandemic.

This is one reason why I think it is critical to be clear about what we mean by recovery. Over the next decade, as students whose learning was not disrupted by the pandemic begin to move through the K-12 system, I’d expect NAEP results to revert back to pre-pandemic levels. We might then be tempted to say that the system as a whole has bounced back. But there are roughly 50 million students whose educations were disrupted — including two of my sons — and I would not want us to declare success unless we’ve also helped the specific students who were impacted make up lost ground. We have an obligation to help them experience accelerated rather than typical growth going forward.

On the other hand, these large scoring drops are presumably also interacting with the long-term stagnation or declines that we saw in last year’s release of long-term trends data from before the pandemic. If the pre-COVID situation was essentially one of weak growth, is it fair to say that the mere return to in-person learning won’t be enough to get students back on track?

That’s exactly right. From 2009 to 2019, we’ve seen the unfortunate combination of stagnant average scores and growing inequality between higher- and lower-achieving students. Today’s release confirmed that those lower-achieving students were also hardest hit by the pandemic. A return to business as usual would therefore only reinforce the pandemic’s unequal effects rather than offset them.

My impression is that the Long-Term Trend results since the early ’70s have essentially shown slowly shrinking performance gaps between students in different subgroups. But yesterday’s release indicated that the math disparity between white and African American students is now growing, and I believe Hispanic and students in the National School Lunch Program (a common metric of poverty) also experienced larger declines in math than white and non-NSLP students, respectively. How concerned should we be that COVID has not only led to general learning loss, but also hindered the progress of historically disadvantaged subgroups?

One legitimate (if clearly partial) success story of American education that is well documented by the Long-Term Trend NAEP is the gradual narrowing of achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. It is therefore jarring to see the math gap between Black and white students increase sharply in this year’s data. The other differences you note across groups were not large enough to be statistically significant, but they do point in the same direction of greater inequality. This is not necessarily surprising given what we know about the pandemic’s impact on historically disadvantaged subgroups generally, but it is certainly concerning.

Were you as surprised as I was by the reading scores, which didn’t show widening racial gaps between white, Hispanic, and African American students? Given what existing studies have shown about literacy setbacks during the pandemic, I was expecting a different result. It also seemed noteworthy that schools in cities, which obviously enroll disproportionate percentages of non-white students, didn’t see lower reading scores for nine-year-olds. How much faith should we put in these figures?

I agree that this pattern in reading is a bit unexpected, all things considered, but I find it hard to be too encouraged by results showing an equally large decline across these three racial groups. I’ll also be curious to see if this pattern is confirmed on the “main NAEP” results set for release this October. The lack of a decline for city schools is also a puzzle. Here, though, it is important to keep in mind that the NCES [National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test] definition of “city” schools is not limited to large urban districts. 

For example, my own local district in Newton, Massachusetts, is classified as a “city” district despite the fact that most Boston-area residents would think of it as a suburb. The results for the 26 school districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment and will be included in the main NAEP release will provide a clearer picture of what’s happened in the nation’s big-city schools.

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.”

Pandemic learning loss and subpar standards have led to a significant decline in outcomes for Virginia’s K-12 students, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his education appointees argued Thursday as they presented a new data analysis of school performance.

Pointing to what the described as an “honesty gap” between what state learning assessments show and how Virginia students fare on a national assessment, Youngkin suggested decisions of prior administrations created an inaccurately rosy picture of the state of K-12 education.

At a news conference in Richmond, Youngkin called education “the singular most important issue for Virginia’s future” and said trends going in the wrong direction could jeopardize the state’s reputation for high-quality schools.

“The significant lowering of expectations, the lack of transparency with data, the weak accountability for these results, that all ends today,” Youngkin said.

Citing , Youngkin and his schools team said Virginia has an unusually wide gap between its state assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests samples of students from each state to produce a metric called “The Nation’s Report Card.”

For 2019, state Standards of Learning assessments showed 75 percent of Virginia fourth-graders proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent proficiency under the NAEP, according to the new report. The gap was wider at higher grade levels, with 76 percent of eighth-graders showing reading proficiency on SOLs, and 33 percent showing proficiency according to the NAEP.

To underscore some parents’ frustration with the state of public schools, the Youngkin administration’s report notes the number of homeschooled students jumped 56 percent in the 2020-2021 school year. That same year, the report says, 3,748 public-school students transferred to private schools in Virginia.

“We are not serving all of Virginia’s children,” Youngkin said. “And we must.”

The Youngkin administration’s analysis showed similar assessment gaps in math scores, and wider gaps in both math and reading for Black, Hispanic and low-income students. The governor’s office also presented data showing those achievements got worse due to pandemic-era school closures, with SOL pass rates dropping substantially between 2017 and 2021 for Black, Hispanic and low-income third-graders while white students showed a more modest decline.

The Virginia Education Association, an advocacy group representing Virginia teachers, blasted the Youngkin report as a political document that relied on “blatant manipulation of data” to “disrespect and belittle the amazing work Virginia educators have done, and continue to do, under incredibly difficult circumstances.”

“If Governor Youngkin is concerned about an ‘honesty gap,’ he need look no further than his own office to find it,” VEA President James J. Fedderman said in a news release.

When asked if the group has any specific critiques of Youngkin’s methodology, a VEA spokesman said the organization was still reviewing the report and expects to have “a more detailed rebuttal” next week.

Education Secretary Aimee Guidera said the data makes an “irrefutable case that this state has not been serving all students well,” a conclusion she said was obscured by past leaders shifting standards and expectations.

“And they often did this in the name of equity,” Guidera said. “President Bush used to refer to this as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ I call it plain rotten. We cannot afford to lose another generation of our children because of our inability to hold ourselves, our schools and our students to high expectations.”

Youngkin’s education agenda, which has focused largely on ending pandemic-related measures like online learning and mask mandates, giving parents more input into school operations, and expanding charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools, has seen mixed results so far in the General Assembly. Democrats have resisted charter schools, prompting Youngkin to pursue in partnership with colleges and universities. He was successful in winning some bipartisan support for legislation to end mandatory masking in schools and notify parents of sexually explicit reading assignments. The still-unfinished state budget is expected to include significant new funding for K-12 education and teacher pay raises.

After the failure of legislation meant to deliver on his campaign promise to rid Virginia schools of so-called critical race theory, a catchall term conservatives use to describe a variety of racial equity and diversity initiatives in K-12 schools, Youngkin has used his executive powers to try to purge the concept of equity from the state’s education bureaucracy.  He also drew strong criticism for setting up a confidential email tipline allowing parents to lodge complaints about allegedly divisive teaching or purported examples of critical race theory.

The tipline and Youngkin’s rhetoric about “restoring excellence” in Virginia schools drew a sharp rebuke earlier this year from the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, which accused Youngkin of presenting an “inaccurate assessment of Virginia’s public education system currently and historically.”

“Again, by most measures, Virginia ranks near the top and surpasses most states throughout the country,” the superintendents’ organization wrote in the March 10 letter. On Thursday, the VASS said it was in the process of reviewing Youngkin’s new report.

“As always, we remain committed to the highest standards for public education in Virginia and hope that we can work with the administration in ascertaining and facilitating the resources and support referenced in the report that will be needed for all children to succeed at those standards,” VASS Executive Director Ben Kiser said in an email.

Proponents say equity-driven initiatives allow for a fuller reckoning with systemic racism and realign resources to address lingering educational disparities in a former Jim Crow state famous for fighting to block racially integrated schools. 

Youngkin has said he supports teaching all Virginia’s history, but he contends equity initiatives encourage overbroad racial stereotyping and division. Among the seven priorities laid out in his new education report is “zero tolerance for discrimination,” described as barring “the ascribing of traits or behavior based on race, gender, political beliefs or religion.”

“We shouldn’t be teaching our children to be judgmental,” the governor said.

In a statement, Senate Democratic leaders ripped the Youngkin report’s assertions as “an outright lie,” “a joke,” “tomfoolery” and “dog-whistle talking points.”

“We all know Governor Youngkin’s end goal — to erase Black history and any mention of equity from Virginia’s curricula,” Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, who chairs the Senate’s Education & Health Committee, said in the news release. “This misguided effort based on fake news and debunked theories is an outright attack from the far right, riling up racist constituencies with lies and deceit. This report shows once again that Governor Youngkin wants to take us back to the days of Jim Crow.”

Joining Youngkin for Thursday’s announcement was former Gov. Doug Wilder, who was elected as a Democrat in his history-making campaign for governor in 1989, but more recently has made a habit of criticizing Democrats and supporting Youngkin.

Though Wilder didn’t speak from the podium during the event, he huddled with Youngkin afterward as reporters looked on, praising the governor’s call for administrators, teachers and parents to work together to put students first.

“I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t believe in you. God bless you,” Wilder told Youngkin. “I hope you have continued success.”

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The information would be voluntarily reported, anonymous and — notable at a time when some states are shunning data deemed politically unpalatable — collected nationwide. If implemented, the initiative would represent the largest-scale effort to date to document the experiences of the nation’s LGBTQ students. 

The push got a boost earlier this week from the White House when President Joe Biden, acting in recognition of Pride month, creating a committee to oversee the expansion of LGBTQ data collection throughout the federal government and directing the department to form a working group to advance policies to protect gay, lesbian and gender nonconforming students and families.     

The move comes after years of conversations among civil rights and education advocates who recognized both the need for the data and the complicated nature of collecting it in ways that are backed by scientific and medical best practices; invite LGBTQ participation; will generate information researchers need; and do not expose young people to the safety risks that coming out sometimes poses. 

“Not having questions asked about sexual orientation and gender identity creates an invisibility and makes it really hard for lawmakers and policymakers to be able to determine what the actual needs of the community are and how best to address them,” says Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. “If you don’t have the data, it makes it hard to argue to a policymaker that they have to change their policies in order to protect LGBTQ folks.”

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, targeting LGBTQ Americans have been introduced in state legislatures this year, many aimed at transgender youth. 

In submitted in April, GLSEN, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ students, noted that NAEP results are used for scholarly research and to make crucial decisions about education policy and distribution of resources to schools. “To better determine how well our K-12 schools are serving the needs of all students, GLSEN urges the NAEP to add LGBTQ+ inclusive survey measures,” the organization wrote.

The change, civil rights groups say, would push schools to take note of and inform solutions.

First administered more than 50 years ago, NAEP has always documented how well U.S. schools meet the needs of students of different races and ethnicities, those with disabilities, low-income children and other subgroups. The tests are administered to a representative sample of fourth and ninth graders, with the results used to identify unmet needs, illuminate disparities and highlight successes.

In a reply to GLSEN sent before Biden’s executive order, the department said it was considering changes to NAEP assessments that would allow for expanded gender categories. The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the exams, “is actively working towards including more gender identity options in future NAEP data collections both from school records (where we get student gender information) and teacher self-reports via the teacher survey questionnaire,” the agency replied. “We are exploring ways to disaggregate student record data into binary and non-binary as a start.”

No timeline for either change was given. While silent on the topic of modifying NAEP to report sexual orientation, the reply letter noted that the center has been part of within the federal government about the issue. 

LGBTQ rights groups say it’s not enough — and is happening too slowly. According to a survey by , in 2021 reported that politics were harming their mental health and that COVID-19 adversely affected their living situation, with just a third calling their home affirming. Forty-two percent said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year, a rate that rises to more than half for trans and non-binary students. 

Particularly problematic: States can opt out of collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity when administering some existing surveys, such as the two main Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviews of youth welfare, Warbelow says. This can obscure bias in ways many people might not anticipate, especially as schools often have no formal record of a student’s orientation and young people are leery of outing themselves. 

“We have some indication that LGBTQ students are overrepresented in disproportionate school discipline,” she says. “So one scenario [could be] where a straight student and an LGBT student are engaged in a disagreement. Oftentimes, it starts by that straight student engaging in bullying. And you see the teacher or the administration end up sending both kids down to the principal’s office. And then the penalty ends up being stiffer for the LGBTQ student.”

In recent years, scientifically and legally sound has gotten a major boost from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which in 2020 recommended that the federal government begin capturing more information and this past March followed up with specific guidance on how best to do so. 

Last spring, in the wake of the National Academies’ reports, came together to press federal agencies to adopt the recommendations. If they succeed, the government will, for the first time, collect data that could be used to draw apples-to-apples comparisons. 

Often referred to as the nation’s report card, NAEP is uniquely suited for collecting sensitive demographic information, proponents of the change say. Because the exams don’t assess individual schools, the results can’t be misused by officials bent on finding gay teachers or trans student athletes, for example. People who are uncomfortable participating can opt out. 

“We want the federal government to be required to collect data, but the individual participant to have the flexibility to be able to say that they’re not going to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity,” says Warbelow. 

For reasons ranging from the well-intended to the political, LGBTQ people are poorly represented in official statistics. For example, an estimated 5 in 6 LGBTQ adults can’t be identified by federal surveys documenting everything from rates of disease to housing discrimination, largely because they rarely include pertinent questions. The experiences of LGBTQ youth in school and in their communities are even more poorly documented. 

While education researchers and policymakers can talk about historically underserved students using deep, wide-ranging data about household income, race, disability, English learner status and experience with housing insecurity and the foster care system, what’s known about queer students is often drawn from small surveys or by extrapolating from those that tabulate information in different ways.

For two decades, GLSEN’s own surveys have consistently found that students subjected to in-school bullying and victimization have poorer educational outcomes, including lower attendance, grade-point averages and rates of college enrollment, than their heterosexual, cis-gendered peers. Students who experience both anti-LGBTQ victimization and racism are most likely to skip school out of fear, report feeling like they don’t belong and experience high levels of depression, the organization noted. Other surveys show that LGBTQ youth are disproportionately homeless and in foster care. 

Meanwhile, CDC surveys show the number of teens identifying as LGBTQ is growing, adding urgency to the need for accurate information. Using two CDC surveys, concluded that the percentage of youth who identify as “non-heterosexual” rose from 8% to almost 12% between 2015 and 2017. 

Estimates from the University of California Los Angeles’ Williams Institute reveal that the number of individuals ages 13 to 17 who identify as transgender between 2017, when few of the surveys used to estimate the size of the population asked about gender identity, and 2020, when LGBTQ information was more widely solicited. 

States, however, are not required to include LGBTQ demographic information when they help conduct CDC surveys. This erases not just the kids, but the public health and safety crises they are experiencing. 

Initial shifts to including LGBTQ questions in federal research have shown that the problems are acute. The Census Bureau began collecting information about the sexual orientation and gender identity of people responding to its Household Pulse Survey a year ago. The initial surveys found that nearly half of LGBTQ people reported experiencing anxiety more than half of the days in a week — twice as many as non-LGBTQ respondents. 

Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, has been part of the conversation about collecting more information about LGBTQ students for years. Schools and other institutions, she points out, have drawn lots of wrong conclusions based on simplistic interpretations of statistics.

“Sometimes the narrative that people take away is that this group of students does not perform well,” says Kowalski. “The blame, the burden is shifted to the student and the family instead of the system and the policy.”&�Բ�����;

She wants the federal government to go further than compiling statistics, with their potential for misuse, to include the people affected — who understand — in designing new data systems and overseeing how the information is publicized and analyzed. 

“The tech piece is easy; you create another box to check,” she says. “The people piece is the hard piece — and we skip over it alot.”&�Բ�����;  

Disclosure: Disclosure: Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Data Quality Campaign and ����Ӱ��.

The prospect makes the federal official in charge of measuring student progress a bit anxious. 

“The likelihood that the scores would be anything but down is pretty small,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. 

While performance among the lowest-scoring fourth- and eighth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress was falling well before the pandemic, Carr predicted, “It’s more than likely we’re going to see the bottom drop even more.”

Known as the Nation’s Report Card and a chief “barometer” of educational achievement in the U.S., the congressionally-mandated NAEP is the only assessment with results broken down by gender, race and socioeconomic status that can be compared across all 50 states. As such, it is a major gauge of achievement gaps that are likely to have grown larger since COVID’s arrival.

Carr’s predecessor, James “Lynn” Woodworth, described this year’s administration as “the most important NAEP assessment that’s ever been done in the history of this country.” In a wide-ranging interview with ����Ӱ��, Carr fleshed out why, explaining that the pandemic had added layers of “noise” that could make results harder to interpret.

‘True change’

Even the most superficial alteration in a student’s testing experience can throw off their performance. In the , researchers determined that a change in the color of the ink on the test booklets contributed to an otherwise unexplained drop in reading performance for 9- and 17-year-olds. In 2002, the mistake was accidentally repeated with a random sample of students, and again, scores dropped. 

But the pandemic has exploded the universe of possible variables: The sample of test-takers includes masked and unmasked students, as well as smaller groups. Social distancing and other changes in the environment could also affect student performance.

“It makes me a little nervous about what we’re going to see, and how I’m going to be able to separate out what is noise and what is true change in students’ performance,” she said. 

At the same time, collecting those results has been far from easy. From staff quitting due to illness to schools rescheduling because of students in quarantine, this round of testing is unlike anything the center has faced in the past. 

“I’m getting notices every day that people are quitting or people have … caught COVID in the schools,” Carr said. 

In December, there were 3,560 NAEP staff members in the field. More than 850 have quit, with over half of those leaving in December and January as Omicron started to spread, according to NCES. 

Because of COVID’s lingering interference, Carr said she was pleasantly surprised schools haven’t pulled out of the assessment. Only one district, Fresno Unified in California, opted not to participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment, which provides results for more than two dozen districts nationwide. 

Nonetheless, state and district chiefs have already expressed concern about whether Carr can guarantee the validity of the results.

“They said, ‘Peggy, I’ve got 900 vacancies. I have people who normally teach art teaching some academic subject,’” she said. 

To the doubters, she emphasized that this year’s tests include the same items used in 2019, which will further give the public a “solid trend line” through the pandemic years, she said. 

NAEP, she stressed, is “still the standard by which other large-scale assessments judge themselves, and even in the context of COVID that has not changed.”

But because of the impact of the pandemic, it might seem as if this year’s results are setting a new “baseline,” Carr said. A baseline, which technically refers to official changes in the test, is the starting point researchers and policymakers use to track student performance over time.

“It’s a new day in many ways,” Carr said. “How tests are being administered, how students are being taught and how they learn in schools today is a little different than it was before COVID.”&�Բ�����;

Despite those challenges, NCES’s responsibility is to maintain the public’s trust in NAEP as an accurate measure, said Andrew Ho, an education professor at Harvard University and a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP.

Carr must help parents and educators understand how the pandemic has affected fourth- and eighth-graders’ math and reading achievement, he said. “It’s not a new baseline if we do our job right,” he said. “It is a decline.”

He and Carr said the urban district results will be especially valuable when viewed against the backdrop of school closures at those sites. 

“There are always policy differences; they just haven’t been so confounded with historic health issues,” Ho said, adding that it’s inevitable the results will become fodder for political arguments over how leaders responded to the pandemic. “Everyone likes to attach a policy story to NAEP results.”

In addition to the reading and math tests, which were delayed a year because of school closures, NCES is testing eighth graders in civics and history and 9-year-olds as part of its long-term trend study. Nine-year-olds were also tested in 2019, which will allow NCES to provide pre- and post-pandemic results. Data from three years ago showed stagnant performance in both reading and math, except for girls, whose math scores dropped five points. Now researchers will be able to see how students in that age group, who were in first or second grade when schools shifted to remote learning, are performing. Next year, 13-year-olds will be assessed.

A in the Senate, introduced this month, proposes that NCES add a new component to measure the long-term impact of COVID on a representative sample of students.

It could be much harder, however, to see how U.S. students fared during the pandemic compared to their peers in other countries. While states and districts generally participate in all non-mandated NAEP tests, such as those in history, economics and technology, Carr struggles to get an adequate sample — 350 schools — for the Program for International Student Assessment and other global comparisons. 

School leaders are bombarded with requests to participate in surveys and an optional assessment can feel like one more burden. When Betsy DeVos was education secretary, Carr asked her to recruit schools for the international assessment. Michael Casserly, who led the Council of the Great City Schools and pushed for the urban assessment results, also helped.

“When Betsy DeVos was here, we had her calling schools, and we got Mike Casserly, who’s a good friend of mine, calling schools and we barely made it,” Carr said. “It’s a hard sell. I’ve got to figure out another way to develop a relationship with the stakeholders on the ground and make it worth their while to participate.”

Cloud-based tests and AI scoring 

As Carr prepares to analyze this year’s NAEP data, she’s also overseeing a modernization of the program, which has been “fast-tracked” by the pandemic, she wrote in a recent , co-authored with Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the assessment’s governing board.

Future tests will be cloud-based and downloaded to districts’ own devices. And beginning in 2024, NCES will no longer hire 3,500 to 4,000 administrators to deliver devices with the assessment to schools. That model, which prevented the center from conducting mandated tests in 2021, typically costs about $62 million. 

While some field staff will still be on site, using local administrators could save $22 million, according to released last week.

Also in 2024, NCES will begin using to score students’ essays. In January, the center announced four winners of a competition who showed AI can score an essay with 88% accuracy compared to trained individuals, Carr said.

“It may be good enough with a little bit of tweaking,” she said, adding that the center will still have human scorers in 2024 to remain “scientifically defensible.”

The center will also continue running its monthly — the result of an early Biden administration to produce data on the impact of the pandemic. The survey tracks the percentages of students in in-person, hybrid and remote learning and has expanded to add questions on , quarantines and mental health. 

The project has pushed the center toward a quicker turnaround — something the governing board and state and local leaders would like to see with NAEP as well. 

“If I don’t have to put together the full-blown report card with all the bells and whistles, maybe I can get it out faster,” Carr said. “But I’m not going to cut short the statistical analysis that I need to make sure we can stand behind the data. I’ll put asterisks on it. I’ll caveat it, and then … whatever it says, I’m going to report it.”

Those are among the updates to a “framework” for the reading assessment that the governing board in charge of the National Assessment of Educational Progress approved Thursday. The unanimous vote represented a significant shift since May, when some members of the panel bitterly opposed a version they thought overly emphasized issues of equity and fairness for students taking the test.

Over the summer, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, and Alice Peisch, vice chair, brought together members to hash out their differences and finalize what one observer called a “forward-looking” approach to measuring students’ reading skills.

“You worked extraordinarily hard to build consensus across an array of perspectives, ensuring an update for NAEP Reading that everyone here can stand behind,” Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the governing board, said during the hybrid meeting, with some members assembled in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and others joining remotely. “It would have been really easy for you all just to sort of hit pause after the May meeting and say, ‘Let’s just keep the old framework.”

The board passed a that resulted from those summer meetings, stating its commitment to equity, but dropping some of the lengthy passages on the topic in an earlier draft. Patrick Kelly, a board member and history teacher in South Carolina, who led a committee working on the document, said he felt confident that none of the members feel “the final product is 100 percent reflective of their personal views. That’s also what consensus is about.”

The board has had a long history of finding common ground despite political differences. Andrew Ho, an assessment expert at Harvard University and former member of the board, said agreement on this issue is “in everyone’s best interest.” Approval of the document means the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the congressionally mandated testing program, can move ahead with developing and piloting assessment questions. With last year’s school closures putting students roughly half a year behind in reading, according to end-of-year results, future tests will also gauge the extent of the pandemic’s impact on learning.

“I think the gap is going to be wider between the racial and ethninc groups,” Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of NCES, told the board, noting the data showing racial differences in remote and in-person learning last school year. “I think the implications are not good for achievement.”

In May, the majority of board members were ready to approve a draft with detailed explanations for how elements in the digital test — such as student writing samples and pop-up hints for some words or concepts — could improve understanding for students who might be unfamiliar with those terms because of their language and cultural backgrounds.

But a few members, especially Russ Whitehurst, argued that highlighting those features of the test at a time when the nation has been arguing over issues of race and discrimination would prove divisive. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, even offered his own draft, eliminating most references to “sociocultural” factors that influence how students comprehend what they read.

The board “itself almost came unglued” over the issue, Chester Finn Jr., president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, wrote in his latest on the saga. But he called the new version “a masterful, praiseworthy piece of work” and “a coherent, forward-looking and intelligible approach to the modern assessment of students’ reading prowess and comprehension.”

Other changes in the new framework include reporting students’ reading skills within content areas — literature, social studies and science. The existing version only provides the categories of literature and “informational texts.” Kelly said unlike in 2004, the last time the document was updated, literacy skills are now “infused” into academic standards.

In addition, results will break out performance levels for former, current and non-English learners. This change will “shed light on any progress — or lack thereof — that might be detectable in the group of former English learners,” the document says.

But even with his glowing review, Finn, a former chair of the board, has some lingering complaints about the issue that led to the board members’ dispute — the purpose of those digital hints and nudges that are intended to motivate students to do their best on an exam that never affects their grade. In the real world, readers don’t get that kind of help, Finn wrote.

“Keep in mind that reading, that most fundamental of subjects, is not in good shape in America today,” he wrote. “We need to bend every effort to teach reading better and ensure that kids learn it well. We don’t need to conceal their deficiencies.”