Kids' reading, math skills are worsening, new test scores reveal. What's going on?
New national test scores show a bleak picture of American education in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fourth and eighth graders' literacy skills dipped – once again – on the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, illuminating how temporary pandemic-related academic setbacks like school closures and remote classes continue to affect students' ability to learn nationwide.
The nation's young people scored an average 5 points lower in reading than kids who tested before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, from 220 to 215 for fourth graders and from 263 to 258 for eighth graders. Many lower performers' scores dipped even lower than the national average, according to the Nation's Report Card published Wednesday.
Reading test score declines began in 2019, were exacerbated because of pandemic-related setbacks and have continued to slide because of the nation's "complex challenges in reading," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said at a news conference Tuesday.
"Student joy for reading is declining. We know that teachers are not asking as much for essay responses to questions," Carr said. "Students are also reading on devices. They're not reading the kind of passages on devices that maybe you and I did years ago."
Lower-performing readers are more likely to be absent at school, the new dataset shows, which also could be contributing to the literacy slide for that group of children, Carr said.
Widest achievement gap between most high- and low-performing learners in 8th-grade math
Fourth and eighth graders also performed worse on the math portion of the 2024 test than they did before the pandemic. Fourth graders scored 3 points lower than the pre-pandemic year on average, and eighth graders scored 8 points lower than before COVID-19 on average.
Some students, including fourth graders and high-performing eighth graders, improved on math tests this year compared with 2022, the data shows.
High-performing eighth graders' math score improvements have contributed to the widest achievement gap between a majority of high and low-performing eighth graders in the history of the national assessment, Carr said.
'Hope is not lost'
The national data shows bright spots in two states. Fourth graders in Louisiana scored higher in reading compared with pre-pandemic levels, and Alabama's fourth graders scored higher on math than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Tuesday's media call, Carr said that the results overall are "sobering" but that "hope is not lost."
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.