Nation’s Report Card Shows Students Struggle With Basic Reading Skills

The pandemic jostled students off course, disrupting learning around the country. Billions in federal relief dollars later and rigorous assessments show that students are still struggling to recover.

A federally mandated evaluation of student performance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — is considered one of the most accurate glimpses at student learning in the country.

The latest results, released Wednesday, were not encouraging.

Despite some improvements — notably in fourth-grade math — the national results were pockmarked by widening gaps in student performance and declines in reading scores, including the largest share of eighth graders who did not meet basic reading proficiency in the assessment’s history.

“Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher performing students,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the assessment, said in a prepared statement. “Lower performing students are still struggling, especially in reading,” she added.

“This is a tough call that we have here as a nation to turn this back around, and it clearly is going to take time” Carr said during a call Tuesday.

Struggles With Reading

The previous round of postpandemic assessment results raised alarm bells.

In 2022, when the first postpandemic results came back, the nation’s report card revealed historic declines in math performance, as well as declines in reading scores for fourth and eighth graders. At the time, officials described the drops as “appalling and unacceptable” and states wrestled over whose performance was worst.

The last couple of years saw ample spending on tutoring in a rush to course-correct student performance. But key federal relief funding programs lapsed — causing budget-strained schools to find creative ways to keep these efforts going — and the latest test scores show that students have not rebounded to prepandemic performance.

There was some good news in the latest NAEP assessment.

In math, the latest results revealed no significant changes for eight graders around the country in the last two years; but also, in a bright spot, a slight increase in math for fourth graders. However, the average math score was still below prepandemic levels.

Some states and urban districts showed signs of recovery as well, such as the District of Columbia Public Schools which exhibited a bounce in fourth grade math performance.

Intriguingly, two states bucked the national trend and actually beat their prepandemic performance: Louisiana saw a bump in reading, and Alabama saw one in math.

But overall the latest results are not a cause for celebration, said Carr, of the National Center for Education Statistics.

Reading scores fell, with the lowest performing students struggling acutely.

According to the study, a student scoring at “basic” level in fourth-grade reading is able to explain the sequence of a plot after reading a text. Yet 40 percent of fourth graders did not meet that standard, the largest group below that threshold in two decades. Meanwhile, an eighth grader scoring at the basic level can figure out the main idea from informational text: about a third of eighth graders fell below that standard, the most in the assessment’s history.

During a call, Carr noted that these declines continue trends that predate the pandemic, going back to 2019.

Unsurprisingly, these struggling students are less likely to read for pleasure and less likely to show up to school. If students aren’t in school, they can’t learn, and that is what these data underscore, Carr said.

Troubling Gaps

The results come at a tense time.

With a new administration in office, the U.S. Department of Education has halted investigations into whether book bans around the country violate civil rights.

Schools around the country are also in the middle of significant changes to how they teach literacy, as many districts adopt “science of reading” approaches following debates over reading curricula.

Severe teacher shortages in the face of budget shortfalls have also hurt schools around the country.

So what are the initial takeaways?

People are interested in whether students have made up the ground lost during the pandemic, and the answer is no, says Alexander Kurz, a principal consultant for the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

As he analyzes the data, he is paying particular attention to widening gaps.

For instance, in math, the gap between high performing and low performing students has widened since 2022, according to summaries of the latest assessments.

Moreover, that gap continues to widen from fourth to eighth grade, Kurz says. When students have a weak foundation in math, it can grow over time because the subject tends to build. For example, to understand algebra, students need to first grasp concepts like multiplication and fractions. So if students have gaps in knowledge early on, and those aren’t filled, they find themselves trying to build on a shaky foundation, Kurz says.

The national statistics can hide relevant differences among subgroups, so it’s important to analyze the data carefully, Kurz says.

Still, Kurz and researchers like him hope to find lessons about the causes of the disparities in coming weeks.