Washington – The children in the United States have continued lose ground in Reading skills Following the COVID-19 pandemic and has made little improvement in mathematics, according to the latest results of an exam known as the Nation’s qualifications ballot.
The findings are another setback for US schools school closures still Youth mental health crisis and High rates of chronic absenteeism. The results of the national exam also show a growing inequality: while the highest performance students have begun to recover the lost land and the lowest performance students are staying further behind.
Given every two years to a sample of children in the United States, the national evaluation of educational progress is considered one of the best meters of academic progress in the United States school system. The most recent exam was administered in early 2024 in each state, testing fourth and eighth grade students in mathematics and reading.
“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, commissioned from the National Education Statistics Center, which supervises the evaluation. “We are not seeing the progress we need to recover the land that our students lost during the pandemic.”
Among the few brilliant points was an improvement in fourth grade mathematics, where the average score increased 2 points on a scale of 500. It is still 3 points lower than the pre-pondemic average of 2019, but some states and districts made Significant advances, included in Washington, DC, where the average score increased 10 points.
Mostly, however, US schools have Not yet started To progress.
The average mathematics score for eighth grade students did not change 2022, while reading scores fell 2 points at both levels. A third of eighth grade students obtained a score under “basic” in reading, more than ever in the history of the evaluation.
Students are considered below the basics if they lack fundamental skills. For example, eighth grade students who obtained basic scores in reading generally could not make a simple inference about the motivation of a character after reading a short story, and some could not identify that the word “worker” means “to work hard”.
Especially alarming for officials was the division between students with the highest and lowest performance, which has ever been expanded. Students with the highest scores surpassed their classmates two years ago, inventing lost land during pandemic. But the lower artists are scoring even lower, leaving further back.
It was more pronounced in eighth grade mathematics: while 10% higher students saw that their scores increased by 3 points, the lowest 10% decreased by 6 points.
That could reflect the investments of families in the recovery of high performance students in the pandemic. “Families who had the resources, hired additional tutors, obtained additional support to take advantage of what was happening in the classroom,” said Eric Mackey, Superintendent of Education in Alabam opportunity or resources to continue fighting. “
The last setbacks follow a historical delay after pandemic in 2022. In the exam that year, the achievement of the students fell through subjects and levels of degree, in some cases by unprecedented levels.
This test round had students whose lives were interrupted by the pandemic. When Covid hit 2020, fourth grade students were in the kindergarten. Eighth grade students were in the fourth grade.
But Carr said that bad results can no longer be blamed only for pandemic, warning that the nation’s educational system faces “complex challenges.”
A survey conducted together with the exam found in 2022 that fewer young students were reading to enjoy, which is linked to lower reading scores. The new results of the survey found students who are often absent from class – A persistent problem throughout the country – they are fighting more.
The results provide new fuel for a national debate on the impact of pandemic school closures, although it is unlikely to add clarity. Some studies have found that longer closures led to greater academic setbacks. The slowest to reopen were often in urban and democratic areas, while the rural areas and led by Republicans were faster.
The new results do not show a “direct link” on the subject, Carr said, although he said that students are clearly better when they are in school.
Among the states that saw the reading scores in 2024 are Florida and Arizona, who were among the first to return to the classroom during the pandemic. Some school systems that had longer closures made advances in fourth grade mathematics, including angels and New York City.
The success of the large urban districts, 14 of which saw a notable improvement in fourth grade mathematics when the nation in general only saw minor profits, can be accredited to academic recovery efforts financed by federal moneyRay Hart, Executive Director of the Grand City School Council, said. Invest in efforts as intensive Tutoring programs And the updates of the curriculum “really prove to make a difference,” he said.
Changes of the pandemic era in childhood outside the classroom may also have affected the scores.
“We should be looking at what social networks and the emergence of the Childhood Based on the screen He is doing for reading skills, ”said Marty West, an academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Parents should read with their children and listen to them reading, Mackey said. “We are worried that students will spend … too long on the phone and there is not enough time reading books,” Mackey said.
Even at school, West said, students are Read and write less. The majority of eighth grade students said last year that their teachers asked them to write several sentences about reading tasks less than six times a year.
“There is no way to avoid the fact that relationships, high quality teachers and really attractive and high expectation classrooms matter more for children,” said Robin Lake, center director on the reinvention of public education.
The United States Department of Education said the results are “heartbreaking” and reflect an educational system that is failing students despite billions of dollars in annual funds and more than $ 190 billion in Federal Pandemia Relief.
“The Trump administration is committed to reorienting our educational system to completely empower states, prioritize meaningful learning and provide universal access to high quality instruction,” the department said in a statement. “The change must happen, and now it must happen.”
The Republicans in Congress quickly blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden.
The representative Tim Walberg, R-Mich., President of the Education and Labor Committee of the House of Representatives, said the decrease is “clearly a reflection of the educational bureaucracy that continues to focus on Awaken policies instead of helping students learn. “
Compared to the 2019 results, eighth grade reading scores have now dropped 8 points. Reading scores have dropped 5 points in both degrees. And in fourth grade mathematics, the scores have dropped 3 points.
However, officials say there are reasons to be optimistic. Carr highlighted the improvement in Louisiana, where the fourth-grade reading has now returned above the pre-pandemic levels, and in Alabama, which achieved that feat in fourth grade mathematics.
Carr was especially laudatory of Louisiana, where a campaign to improve reading competition It resulted in higher performance and low -performance students than the 2019 scores.
She caught attention to the state approach in the Reading Science -A approach supported by the research that focuses on the teaching of phonetics, or the basic components of words, as children build towards literacy. The concept has been adopted by Republicans and Democrats and has been accredited by profits in some states.
“I would not say that hope is lost, and I would not say that we cannot change this,” Carr said. “It has been shown that we can.”
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Annie Ma contributed Washington reports, and Sharon Lurye contributed to New Orleans.
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