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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Very Discouraging’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bill, perhaps the centerpiece of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, had sprinted through the U.S. House and Senate before hitting the summer quagmire that so often ensnares federal legislation. Administration officials hoped that a presidential swing through Florida might reawaken Washington and speed its way to passage.

It was only minutes before the activities began when Bush learned that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. Like many, Brogan initially assumed the reports referred to a light aircraft that had wandered off-course.

But as the room filled with the singsong cadence of kids reading aloud — the activity, centered on a called The Pet Goat, had been selected to draw attention to NCLB’s literacy provisions — the atmosphere changed noticeably. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached Bush to whisper the news of the second crash. And over a seven-minute interval that would be picked apart for years, the president’s focus seemed to drift between the children in front of him and the horrors unfolding in Manhattan. Brogan called the moment “extraordinary.”

“He didn’t change his expression, but the color in his face visibly changed, especially for people who were only a few feet from him. It was crystal-clear that whatever he just heard was very disturbing.”

As the activity wound down, the president excused himself to join a call with national security leaders. After stopping to deliver brief remarks from the school’s media center, including a moment of silence for the still-uncounted victims, Bush’s entourage headed immediately to Air Force One. The advocacy tour was over. A wartime presidency had begun.

The ties linking 9/11 with NCLB were the result of a historical accident. During the 20 years that passed since that day, the U.S. government undertook generational commitments to both rid the world of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and provide an excellent education to every American child. Begun amid a swell of bipartisan approval, both missions fell far short of their goals as the afterglow of national unity first ebbed, then extinguished altogether. And while much of the vision of NCLB is preserved in federal law, controversial requirements around school accountability have been significantly loosened; some of the law’s original architects even attribute its demise, in substantial part, to a combination of hyperpartisanship and neglect that arose as the Bush administration turned its focus to the ever-expanding War on Terror.

“This is really what 9/11 meant: People moved on to other things,” said Sandy Kress, an education advisor to President Bush who helped lead the White House’s efforts to lobby for NCLB. “Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, plus the return of normal politics, that was huge. The president certainly moved on, and so did the rest of the world.”

Moving at ‘breakneck speed — for Washington’

Kress came to Washington after the 2000 election to transform the sweeping education proposals of then-Gov. Bush’s campaign into legislation. He spent years before that as a power player in Texas politics, serving as president of the Dallas school board before receiving appointments to a series of commissions empaneled throughout the 1990s to improve the state’s schools.

At that time, Washington’s role in K-12 schools offered barely a hint of what it would later become. The principal statute governing federal interventions in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, had been reauthorized in 1994 as the Improving America’s Schools Act, a fairly radical revision that required states to make “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency for all their students. But reforms were still driven overwhelmingly by a set of ambitious governors: like Roy Roemer of Colorado, Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Bush of Texas.

By the time ESEA was due for another reauthorization, leaders in both parties were settling on a single model of reform. States would set high standards, deliver the instruction necessary to help students meet them, and institute regular assessments to keep an eye on their progress.

“I think people at the federal level realized they couldn’t get away any longer with simply saying, ‘America’s children aren’t learning enough, but just keep doing what you’re doing,’” said Brogan, who was elected as Florida’s commissioner of schools in 1994 and would go on to lead the state university systems of both Florida and Pennsylvania before serving as assistant secretary of education under president Donald Trump. “We had to come up with some new ideas…and at least spell out with clarity what kinds of things children were expected to master with each of the passing grade levels.”

That bipartisan convergence was reflected in placed on education reform by the campaigns of both Bush and Democrat Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election, argued Tom Loveless, former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Bush, whose own package of reforms in Texas had won the admiration of even some Democrats in Congress — including California Rep. George Miller, an avowed liberal serving on the House Education and Workforce Committee — was only too happy to break with prevailing orthodoxy in order to build his brand as a different kind of Republican. That included moving away from the party’s oft-stated commitment to abolish the federal Department of Education.

“Bush simply jettisoned that,” Loveless said. “He dropped it completely — it was in the ’96 platform, but it was not in the 2000 platform because the Bush people wouldn’t allow it in.”

“That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”
—Sandy Kress, education advisor to former President George W. Bush.

Bush began setting a course for a major new education law almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed him the presidency, meeting at the White House in January with Miller, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and future Republican House Speaker John Boehner. , as the proposal soon became known, passed through both chambers even though it was loaded with tough language on equity and accountability. Under the new law, states would be required to test all students between grades 3-8, separate the data by class and ethnicity, and publish detailed school report cards based on the results. Billions of dollars in new federal funding would be allocated to support improvement efforts.

Margaret Spellings — a senior Bush advisor whom he would later appoint as U.S. secretary of education — said she didn’t fully appreciate at the time how quickly the initiative came together.

“I was a relative newcomer [to national politics], and little did I know that this was all happening at breakneck speed for Washington,” she said. “Particularly when we fast-forward 20 years, it really is amazing that this mammoth piece of policy, the major elements of which stand to this day, got done that fast.”

But the process stalled in conference, a lengthy process intended to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions. As the summer dragged on, dozens of conferees worked through a torturous debate over how to define adequate yearly progress, then left Washington for August recess. The economy was in recession, and the president’s approval ratings were ticking downward. Eager to return permanently to Texas, Kress began to worry how long his sojourn in the capital would last.

“By the end of the summer, things were not so rosy,” he recalled. “We were thinking about trying to rev it up and get going again, and that’s how that Florida trip was planned.”

Reinvigorating bipartisanship

At around 8:15 a.m. on September 11, Kress was in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s Colony Beach and Tennis resort, presenting him with talking points and a visual aid — a chart showing America’s education expenditures growing over time, plotted against stagnant national test scores — for what he hoped would be a news-making speech at Booker Elementary.

On campus, Kress skipped the classroom visit to brief reporters before the president took the stage. Instead, he watched with them as a television at the school’s media center broadcast live footage of United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the Secret Service moved hurriedly to coordinate the group’s departure, the stagecraft morphed from political salesmanship to an emergency speech.

“Now we’re getting instructions: ‘You are to come with me and stand right here, and the president’s going to give some remarks. First thing, take down the chart’ — I did that — ‘and then stand right here. And when the president says his last words, he will go, and you’ll be right on him, and you’re to get in the car.’ It was all solemn and lockstep.”

From the Sarasota airport, Air Force One sped to Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base (“The plane took off faster than I’d ever lifted off on a plane, and got higher than I’d ever been on a plane,” Kress noted.) There it shed most of its passengers while Bush, still considered a potential target, delivered before departing to another location with his key political and security staffers. With virtually every airplane in the country grounded, Kress and his companions only arrived back in Washington that evening, in time to see the smoking wreckage of the Pentagon attack.

Along with his fears for the country, and intermittently his own safety, he couldn’t help worrying about the fate of the historic law he’d spent most of the year negotiating. Would the massive loss of life, to say nothing of the inevitable military action that would follow, leave room for a huge, expensive law overhauling K-12 schools?

As it turned out, he would later reflect, the collective outrage provoked by the attacks proved vastly more effective at pushing NCLB to the finish line than any messaging event could have. Congress would soon be occupied with authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan and drafting the USA Patriot Act, but both Democrats and Republicans also sought the chance to pass a major piece of domestic legislation and show that the nation’s business was still underway.

“9/11 probably reinvigorates bipartisanship for a bit,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin College on the politics of NCLB. “And there was an idea that we have to show, as a country, that we can make progress on things other than terrorism and war: ‘This is something we’ve already gotten most of the way through, and we should do it.’”

Before the year was out, overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate voted to accept the version of the bill that emerged from the conference committee. On January 8, 2002, Bush signed it, flanked by its congressional stewards, at an Ohio school located in Boehner’s district. The group then proceeded to Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts for a celebration at the famed exam school Boston Latin. Only time constraints prevented them from flying to Miller’s California stomping grounds, Kress said.

In retrospect, No Child Left Behind was likely too far down the tracks to be derailed by events. But, as Spellings argued, the rush of purpose and unity following 9/11 put “a rocket booster” under it; moreover, national attention was significantly diverted from the last months of negotiations, which may have made final concessions go down smoother.

“They were trying to hold that coalition together without offending the far left or far right,” Loveless said — a towering task, given that teachers disliked the new testing requirements and conservatives resented losing out on a longed-for federal voucher program. “Bush really wanted a bipartisan bill, and I think the focus on foreign policy allowed them to do whatever they needed to do in conference and get the bill out.”

A short honeymoon

American flags were still flying from windows, and the renewed sense of national assurance only beginning to waver, when skepticism of NCLB began festering in school districts and state capitals.

Conflict arose almost immediately over new money. Under the law, total federal funding for K-12 schools between 2000 and 2003. But for schools now awakening to the threat of sanctions (including governance changes like the mass replacement of staff or restructuring as a charter school) if their students didn’t make consistent, measurable strides toward college readiness, it seemed unfair that escalating expectations on their staffs weren’t accompanied by continuing commitments of resources.

Their doubts spread soon enough to the public at large. In Brookings, Loveless noted that surveys from the law’s early years demonstrated little widespread understanding of its impact, including penalties for consistently underperforming schools. But as participants learned more of NCLB’s key provisions, they consistently came to like it less, he found.

“I think one thing NCLB was able to paper over was the fact that it did have punitive measures involved,” Loveless argued. “When people were polled on the question, in 2001 or 2002, ‘What do you do with a failing school?,’ respondents overwhelmingly supported giving more resources to that school — not closing it or transferring teachers or anything like that.”

Combined with its “utopianism” — the law put forward the aspiration that every student in the country would reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, a starry-eyed notion that later became a punchline — NCLB’s main weakness lay in its fundamental challenge to Americans’ sunny perceptions of schools, Loveless said.

“It’s been a mainstay in polling: People are just happy with their local schools. And parents are even happier with the schools they send their own children to. So once it became evident that those schools were also endangered by sanctions and maybe weren’t quite what they were cracked up to be, [the law] lost some popularity.”

Eventually the dissatisfaction spread to Washington, where even NCLB’s supporters were increasingly bogged down in the fervid debate over whether Bush’s “Global War on Terror” should extend to Iraq. Along with industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, a diverse alliance of civil rights organizations including EdTrust, La Raza, and the Urban League had pushed hard to make testing and accountability a reality in every American school; but by 2004, NAACP chairman its mandates of fostering a “drill-and-kill curriculum.”

Consistent blows were landed by none other than Kennedy, a figure as vital to NCLB’s passage as any except the president. On the second anniversary of the happy ceremony held at Boston Latin, Kennedy’s office issued giving Bush a “D-minus” for rolling out his signature education reform. In an unmistakable dig at Bush’s famous photo op of the previous year, the release called it “way too soon for the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on No Child Left Behind.”

For the temporary boost it delivered to American pride and purpose, Kress said, September 11 ultimately sabotaged the “nice, short-term story” of NCLB’s enactment.

“Passing a bill should be a very positive event in a movement, but if you think passing a bill is the culmination of a movement, then you don’t understand politics,” he said. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”

Though NCLB’s authors intended for the law to be reauthorized by 2007, it remained in effect for another eight years as controversy built up over its demands on states and school districts. have credited the landmark legislation with lifting student achievement and closing achievement gaps , but it has also been blamed for through an over-reliance on testing.

Those concerns contributed to the push to replace NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which offered states more latitude to design their own systems for measuring school performance. In the years since its 2015 passage, committed reformers have complained that the new law is far too slack, allowing states to potentially ignore failing schools and that reveal which students are falling behind.

Spellings credited NCLB’s supporters in Congress, industry, and the civil rights world with ensuring that many of its key principles remained in place. But she also warned that a political retreat from testing and accountability was underway, “flying under the banner of COVID and mental health and all other manner of bullshit.”

“The secret sauce — and this is what’s under threat in the states — is annual assessments, disaggregated data, and transparency,” she said. “It’s at risk.”

Rudalevige’s research as a political scientist ultimately led him to study the growing powers of the “imperial presidency.” He agreed that it became increasingly challenging for politicians to mend or improve NCLB — still less reauthorize it — once debates over the War on Terror came to “distract attention and dissolve whatever bipartisanship was still left.“.

“Could you do it if you had full presidential attention? Maybe, but Bush didn’t have that, and he didn’t have the institutional resources to make it work without that. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could put on auto-pilot.”

Lead Image: President George W. Bush was reading with a group of Florida second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, delivered the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. (Paul Richards and George W. Bush Presidential Library/Getty Images) Photo illustration by Meghan Gallagher/����Ӱ��

A little more than a decade after the fight over the standards began, the vast majority of U.S. students still learn from curricula that are at least nominally aligned with Common Core. But a wave of research released over the last few years suggests that, far from being either a K-12 panacea or a domineering exercise in Washington overreach, the huge shift in policy had a relatively meager impact on student achievement, and may not have altered teacher practices nearly as much as was originally thought.

The latest data point comes from published in the open-access journal of the American Education Research Association. Analyzing standardized test performance from states that adopted and implemented Common Core early on, researcher Joshua Bleiberg found that scores ticked up only modestly over the first few years. The improvement was limited to scores in math, and even that was enjoyed disproportionately by relatively well-off children.

Bleiberg, a research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, said that his findings pointed to the same general picture of Common Core that earlier research has yielded: an idea that failed to live up to expectations.

“There are now a few studies, including mine, that find small effects for math or ELA, whether they’re positive or negative,” he said. “I think a lot of people have accurately characterized that as a policy failure. That was not the objective, and the effect sizes were so small.”

To examine the changes triggered by Common Core, Bleiberg compared fourth- and eighth-grade scores on math and reading over six iterations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. The last two rounds of the exam came in 2011 and 2013, when the standards were beginning to be enacted. Altogether, he assembled data from hundreds of thousands of students across roughly 4,000 schools.

While the majority of states had begun on the road to Common Core by 2013, only some were “early adopters” that had already established new professional development and curriculum standards, or officially mandated that instruction had to be aligned with Common Core. (Fourteen states were excluded from the research entirely, either because they never adopted Common Core or they had comparatively rigorous academic standards in place even before its arrival on the scene.) By exploiting the differences in timing, Bleiberg set out to isolate the effects that could be plausibly attributed to the new standards.

Those effects were hardly transformative — only 10 percent of a standard deviation in NAEP math results. Using eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch as a stand-in for poverty, the growth in scores was greater for economically advantaged white students — and much more significant for economically advantaged African American fourth-graders — than their less affluent peers.

The conclusions are similar to those of other studies that have probed Common Core’s impact on learning, which have generally shown achievement either unchanged, rising very slightly, or even sinking somewhat. Tom Loveless, a former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, conducted several of those studies and recently published . In an interview, he described the general findings on Common Core’s early returns as simply disappointing.

“There’s no other way to say it, especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty,” Loveless said. “What a distraction, to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just minuscule.”

The heart of the reform’s “failure” lay in its theory of action, he argued. Even ambitious regulatory changes must penetrate multiple layers of authority before eventually reaching classrooms. In the case of Common Core, the federal government had to induce states to rewrite their standards of learning, states themselves had to prepare their districts to implement them, and districts had to bring along schools and employees. That tortuous chain of custody, which Loveless analogized to the children’s game of telephone, makes it challenging to ensure that the designers’ original intentions are ever carried out.

“I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his or her own building with a teacher who has low standards,” Loveless said. “So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that just doesn’t work.”

Though the standards don’t appear to have significantly raised the bar for student performance over their first decade, Bleiberg said there was little reason to think that anything might be gained by abandoning them now. But it remained an open question, he said, to what extent the huge expenditure of money, time, and political capital had succeeded in altering instruction. In fact, conducted by the RAND Corporation suggested that by 2016 — well into Common Core’s implementation phase — most teachers still weren’t using curricular materials that were highly aligned to the new standards.

The inability of authorities to persuade teachers to buy into the approach may have spelled disappointment from the start, Bleiberg observed.

“States can’t direct, really, what teachers think, and so teachers will correctly use their judgment in their own classrooms. This is a reform that’s particularly sensitive to those types of challenges, and I think the people in 2007-2009 who were thinking about it perhaps didn’t adequately take that into account, and that’s why it didn’t work as well as they thought it would.”