The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation’s Report Card, is a congressionally mandated large-scale assessment administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). It measures U.S. students’ knowledge and skills in subjects such as math, reading, writing, science, U.S. history and civics. Since its inception in 1969, NAEP has provided important information about student academic achievement and learning experiences, helping to inform education policy and practice.
The recently released report on the status of educational slippage during COVID-19 was covered by all the major media. Every major newspaper carried the findings, and much coverage was provided by experts and television reporters. Educators were hoping to see a recovery from the loss of learning incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the most recent release of federal test scores—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the drop in achievement has only persisted. The share of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills, as defined by NAEP, was the largest ever recorded in the exam’s three-decade history—33%. The share of fourth graders at “below basic” was the highest in 20 years, at 40%. Math made some progress, though not enough to bridge the gaps that the pandemic created.
Students at the top academically are performing as they did pre-pandemic. The weakest and most struggling students scored the worst, despite efforts in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills. Our worst-performing students are reading at all-time low levels. Although the data largely reflects public schools, we must realize that day school students may also be foundering. Books and reading go up against a whole lot: screens, phones, AI and other literacy shortcuts. The NAEP exam is widely regarded as more rigorous than many of the state-level standardized tests. But the low scores suggest that the skills essential for school and work are missing.
The fourth-grade reading students at the bottom of NAEP’s basic level cannot put events from a story in order or describe the effects of a character’s actions. In eighth grade, below basic students cannot identify the main idea of a text or distinguish opposing sides of an argument. There is one spot of good news in an otherwise dismal report—Louisiana fourth graders. Although their overall reading scores were consistent with the national average, a number of students equaled or surpassed pre-pandemic levels of achievement. Louisiana has set its attention on implementing a series of strategies to align early literacy instruction with what cognitive science research shows. The curriculum teaches what is most commonly referred to as systematic phonics and vocabulary instruction. That method, though very popular, hasn’t yet become a national trend.
Many blame COVID and distance learning through online classes for the deplorable reading results. The fact is that reading scores started to decline well before the virus hit. Researchers have shown that decreasing performance in children is comparable to adults’ decline in aptitude over the same 24 months. Researchers study student classrooms in order to understand why students are or are not learning more. Some of the reasons can be traced to the screen time, and cellphones and social media habits. It’s likely becoming even more of a problem as children and adults watch more video on their phones. So this gives rise to reading text displacement. It’s likely that phones making our attention spans shorter, along with kids and adults having less ability to focus, is behind lower reading scores.
In math, high-achieving fourth graders—those scoring at the 75th percentile and above—are performing like similar fourth graders did in 2019. But fourth graders doing relatively poorly in math have not caught up with those who lost ground. In eighth-grade math, only high-achieving students saw gains, though they remained below pre-pandemic levels. We can’t be focused on just getting more students to a higher proficiency level. A student survey administered with NAEP showed that 30% of eighth graders were enrolled in algebra, a slight drop from 32%in 2019.
Student absenteeism has declined since 2022 at grades four and eight, with approximately 30% of students saying they had missed three or more days of school in the past month. But at both grade levels, absence rates are still about 25% higher than they were beforehand. It seems fairly self-evident that if we want kids to do well in school, they have to show up to school.
Day school students, on the whole, perform better than public school students on standardized tests. There should be a very large and national study comparing day school standardized test scores to private school performance—there is no such collection of data. That would be an apples to apples comparison rather than the static norms that compare them to public schools. Day schools boast that their students are in the highest percentiles. This is certainly true when comparing them nationally to public school students. However, norms are available just for private schools as well. Parents are entitled to know how well our day schools measure up to these schools.
Dr. Wallace Greene is a leading educator and consultant to day schools.