I’m afraid the next two days of ABPTL will be filled with bad news when it comes to our traditional K-12 public school system and the progress it’s made making the nation’s young learners smarter and stronger when it comes to their reading and problem-solving abilities.
NAEP (the National Assessment of Education Progress) data, or the Nation’s Report Card, was released last week and the news wasn’t good. Over the next two columns, we’ll explore the data itself, focus specifically on reading performance, and highlight one state’s performance as a bright spot in an otherwise dismal report.
Today, let’s focus on the big picture – national performance and trends on NAEP.
Last week, EducationWeek released a series of articles focused on the NAEP story. One, written by Kevin Mahnken, reported that,
“Hopes for a post-COVID academic recovery were dashed Wednesday morning with the publication of new federal testing data for elementary and middle schoolers.”
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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 2019. Notably, the states 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.” (More on Louisiana tomorrow).
…
Stephen Sawchuk, assistant managing editor at EducationWeek, released a video last week that attempted to connect the “why” with “what” NAEP was reporting in this last round of testing. Sawchuk pointed to the following reasons as “maybes” when it came to explaining “why” these low scores were occurring:
Absenteeism – although attendance has started to increase in our post-pandemic K-12 schools, attendance is still a concern. And most traditionalists believe that kids can’t learn when they aren’t in school.
Reading volume – Americans, both young and old, have stopped engaging in the practice of reading, and that seems to be making everyone less smart.
Middle school math – According to Sawchuk, this subject continues to be a pain point for the country. It seems that America’s young learners are not transitioning well between fundamental math to more abstract thinking.
Accountability – Recent dips in NAEP performance roughly align with the absence of federal accountability standards beginning around 2016. The past two presidential administrations (Trump and Biden) did not put a lot of emphasis on state accountability when it came to reading and math.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at why reading scores are falling in the country, beyond the decrease of reading volume. And we’ll take a careful look at what’s happening in Louisiana, not known for its high-performing public education system, but now the only state that showed a fourth-grade reading increase since 2019.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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