American students are performing poorly in reading and math skills, failing to regain lost ground during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered to fourth graders and eighth graders.
“The most notable challenges evident in the 2024 data are in reading comprehension. Reading scores dropped in both fourth and eighth grades since 2022, continuing declines first reported in 2019, before the pandemic,” said a Jan. 29 statement from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the tests.
As for math scores, fourth grade students registered a two-point gain from 2022. However, this fails to plug the five-point decline in math scores from 2019 to 2022. Eighth grade scores “showed no significant change.”
NAEP, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, measures student achievement, depicting the “state of our K-12 education system and what our children are learning.”
“Overall, student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic performance,” NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said in the statement. “Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students. Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”
The NAEP has three achievement levels, the lowest being NAEP Basic. In the 2024 test, a larger percentage of students were found to have scored below the NAEP Basic level in reading skills.
Among fourth graders, 40 percent scored below NAEP Basic in 2024, as did 33 percent of eighth graders. Both grades performed worse than in 2022.
“NAEP has reported declines in reading achievement consistently since 2019, and the continued declines since the pandemic suggest we’re facing complex challenges that cannot be fully explained by the impact of COVID-19,” said NCES Associate Commissioner Daniel McGrath.
Fourth grade reading scores dropped from 2022 for Asian and white students.
Among eighth grade students, reading scores fell by five points for Hispanics and one point for whites.
In math, fourth grade and eighth grade scores remained lower than in 2019. In terms of race, average math scores improved for black, Hispanic, and white students in fourth grade.
Global Competitiveness
Following the release of the NAEP report, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) blamed liberal, progressive policies for the students’ poor performance.
“When we fail our children, we fail our nation’s future. Today’s NAEP scores continue the concerning trend of declining performance nationwide,“ he said. ”This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies rather than helping students learn and grow.
“I’m thankful we have an administration that is looking to reverse course, and I look forward to helping reform our education system to better serve our youth.”
The dismal performance of American students comes in the context of an increasingly competitive globalized world, with other nations possibly outperforming the United States in technology and finance.
A Dec. 16, 2024, analysis by the nonprofit newsroom The Hechinger Report examined results from the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
U.S. eighth graders ranked 22nd out of 44 countries and sub-national regions. The United States had an average score of 488, far below Singapore and Taiwan, which scored above 600. Fifteen nations had scores between 500 and 600.
The advantage for the United States was in numbers. For instance, 360,000 American eighth grade students were in the top 10 percent of the most advanced level. This was far higher than 33,000 eighth graders in Singapore, which has a far lower overall population than the United States.
Meanwhile, there is a growing focus on charter schools that offer a different curriculum and operate independently of government regulations compared with public schools. A November 2023 report found that students from charter schools had better test scores than their public counterparts.
“We find that charter schools are quite a bit more cost-effective, so for every dollar in, they provide much better test scores, and they have a higher ROI [return on investment],” Josh McGee, one of the researchers of the report, told The Epoch Times.
“For each year of education, students will learn more and make more by going to charter schools rather than traditional public schools.”
