The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for 2024 have just been released, spawning a flurry of thinkpieces, op-eds, and research reviews. Why all the fuss?
NAEP assessments measure students’ knowledge and skills in mathematics, their ability to solve problems in mathematical and real-world contexts, and their reading comprehension skills. They are administered to a nationally representative sample of 8th and 12th-grade students. In simple terms, they offer a pulse check on the state of the American educational system.
The 2024 twelfth grade reading and math scores show historic lows. In reading, 35 percent of twelfth graders were at or above proficiency. In math, 22 percent of twelfth graders were at or above proficiency.
My colleague Catrin Wigfall analyzed the test and provided sample questions in her analysis here.
However, there are clear winners and losers found in the NAEP subdata. The gap between higher and lower performers is growing.
For those who have more, more will be given
All students, even high performing students, showed lower NAEP scores than in years past. Yet, some subgroups saw considerable decline.
Generally, this breakdown wasn’t only along race, gender, or economic lines. Instead, the data showed that median-performing students and low-performing students did dramatically worse on the NAEP than in years past.
As seen in the graph above, scores peaked in 2013, but then began to decline. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the line downwards becomes sheer, almost vertical, for lower-performing and median students. Higher performing students, however, show little change.
Some achievement gaps have been well documented for years. White and Asian students tend to do better than Black and Hispanic students, and both special needs and English learner students tend to struggle with academic performance. Those trends were visible in this year’s data as well.
What sparks concern is the tumultuous plummeting of scores for low achieving students across ethnicity. The graph below analyzes the changes in student scores by demographic from 2013 (when scores first began to decline) to 2024.
Across every ethnic group, the bottom 10 percent is plummeting far, far faster than the top. While Black and Hispanic student scores declined regardless of their performance tier, their lowest performing students showed scores that were dropping far quicker than their highest performing students.
The same is true when students are sorted by economic status. No matter what kind of wealth a student hails from, the bottom is falling faster than the top.
The pattern holds true once more if students are analyzed through the lens of parental educational attainment.
While the bottom 10 percent of some groups (students with disabilities and English learners) did not see significant slides, most students did.
These scores are deeply concerning. The twelfth graders who took these assessments have graduated high school by now; they are in the workplace, vocational programs, and colleges.
And, it turns out, only one in four could solve a math problem that consisted of tallying items on a receipt and calculating a tip.
Why are our most struggling students achieving lower and lower scores?
There is no clear consensus as to why lower-achieving students experience such dramatic score declines, but there are many theories.
Strikingly — and unfortunately —- it doesn’t appear that COVID-19 caused the low test scores, but exacerbated them. The decline began in 2013, not 2020.
One theory that’s gained traction focuses on the ubiquity of the smartphone and the resulting struggles with focus, leisure reading, and mental health that have led many districts recently to ban smartphones. This theory fits the timeline of declining test scores, but does not account for America’s poor performance in comparison to rising test scores in other countries like England, Australia, Italy, and Japan — after all, everyone else in the Western world also has a smartphone.
Another idea, one that perhaps operates in tandem with the smartphone thesis, emphasizes that learning is always done in community. And students’ communities may not always be a great help: by many metrics, the average American is getting dumber. This fact clouds the data surrounding low NAEP scores. The low literary performances by 12th graders might say less about our education system and more about our national culture. To some extent, this is a compounding problem. One will not be able to complete a trigonometry problem if the geometry class was not understood, nor read a work of classic literature if, like many high schoolers, they have never read a full novel. The struggling students of today become the teachers, parents, and bosses of tomorrow. How will they raise the next generation?
Other thinkers point to wider trends in education. Standards-based grading, rebranded as “equity-based” grading, has faced strong teacher criticism. Researcher Chad Aldeman argues that part of the answer could come from a lack of accountability, saying,
[M]y top explanation has been the erosion of federal accountability policies. In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. That timing fits, and it makes sense that easing up on accountability, especially for low-performing students, led to achievement declines among those same kids.
Researchers such as Paul E. Peterson and Michael J. Petrilli argue that both red and blue lawmakers have ignored K-12 accountability and reform, to everyone’s great detriment. Petrilli, in particular, emphasizes that Democratic states have greater room for educational reform.
Currently, it seems likely that to some extent, all these theories (and possibly more) that attempt to diagnose the problem hold water. Our education system is old, complex, and subject to many cultural forces.
Teachers and administrators have strong desires to boost the abilities and opportunities of the lowest achieving students. To that end, some have pointed towards charter schools as a place where academic rigor, personalized approaches, and high expectations can target and support disadvantaged students. But charter schools are not the solution for every child.
The path forward requires swift vision and action. School-level accountability, “no-excuse” schools, basic skills training, scientific reading training, and proven discipline policies are good places to begin. To quote Chad Aldeman,
It may sound counterintuitive, but policymakers looking to raise the ceiling on student achievement should start by making sure they raise the floor.