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America’s falling standards in reading and maths predate the pandemic
The test results of the lowest-performing children are falling the furthest
“WE CAN’T BE competitive in the 21st century if we continue to slide the way we have,” President Joe Biden warned in October. Mr Biden worries in particular that educational attainment in America is sliding. Recently published scores, from tests taken just before the covid-19 pandemic, show how far.
As part of its “long-term trend” project, more or less every four years since the 1970s the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has administered reading and maths tests to a sample of American students aged nine and 13. There was no test in 2016. The results of the latest, in January 2020, were not good. “This was the first time in the almost 50-year history…of the long-term trend assessments that we observed declines among 13-year-olds,” said Peggy Carr of the part of the Department of Education which oversees the NAEP. Average scores for this age group fell by three points in reading and five points in maths (see chart). (The scales run from zero to 500: a score of 150, for example, indicates ability to carry out simple reading tasks or cope with simple arithmetical facts; 300 denotes facility with “complicated information” in reading or “moderately complex” reasoning in maths.)
The scores of the nine-year-olds did not fall by any statistically significant amount. But when grouped by performance levels, the plight of struggling students across both age cohorts is more acute than the overall numbers would suggest. Between 2012 and 2020 maths and reading scores for worse-performing students fell by more than those of their better-performing peers, which were mostly stagnant.
Maths scores have been particularly slippery. While 13-year-olds in the 90th percentile saw little change in their scores between 2012 and 2020, scores for the tenth percentile fell 12 points. The maths gap between black 13-year-olds and their white counterparts, which in previous assessments seemed to be narrowing slightly, also grew. While in 2012 average scores for white 13-year-olds were 28 points higher than those of black students, in 2020 this difference grew to 35 points.
Explaining these trends is thorny. (Some commentators are so reluctant to use these tests to speculate on broader trends that they call doing so “misnaepery.”) Some studies blame the fallout from the financial crisis in 2008 for harming education. But there is no consensus on why things have not improved again. The results of the next set of long-term trend tests, due to be held in 2024, will reflect, among other things, the impact of school closures during covid-19. The current data show that many American students entered that difficult time already woefully behind their peers. And since maths is more difficult than reading to pick up outside school, the pandemic may then harm scores in that subject even further.
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