Washington – The children of the United States have continued to lose ground in reading skills as a result of COVID-19 Pandemia And they have 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 and reflect the innumerable challenge that education has altered, from pandemian school closures to a 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.
For the most part, however, American schools have not yet begun 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 below “basic” in reading, the most 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 the top 10% scores of the students increased by 3 points, the lower 10% decreased by 6 points.
“We are deeply concerned about our low performance students,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the Governing Board of the National Evaluation, which establishes policies for the exam. “For a decade, these students have been in decline. They need our urgent attention and our best.”
The last setbacks follow a historical setback in 2022. In the exam that year, the achievement of the students fell into the subjects and levels of grade, 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, and 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. And the new results of the survey found that students who are often absent from the class, a persistent problem throughout the country, are fighting more.
“The data is clear,” Carr said. “Students who do not come to school are not improving.”
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. Meanwhile, some systems of large schools that had longer closures made advances in fourth grade mathematics, including Los Angeles and New York City.
The success of the great urban districts, 14 of which saw a notable improvement in fourth grade mathematics when the nation as a whole saw minor profits, can be accredited to academic recovery efforts financed by the federal relief of the pandemic, said Ray Hart, Executive Director of the Great City School Council. Investing in efforts as intensive tutoring programs and updates of the curriculum “is really demonstrating a difference,” he said.
Republicans in Congress quickly rushed the Democrats and the administration of former President Joe Biden.
The representative Tim Walberg, Republican of Mich., President of the Chamber Education and Labor Committee, said that the decline is “clearly a reflection of the educational bureaucracy that continues to focus on alarut policies instead of helping students to learn and grow. ”
“I am grateful that we have an administration that seeks to reverse the course,” he said in reference to President Trump.
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 Louisiana’s laudatory, where a campaign to improve reading competition resulted in higher performance and low -performance students that exceed the 2019 scores.
“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.”
By
