High school seniors’ average reading and math scores have dropped on the “nation’s report card”—and the scores of students struggling the most have fallen to historic lows.
Results released today from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more students than ever before are scoring below NAEP’s threshold for mastery of “basic” skills. It’s the first time the tests have been given to 12th graders since before the pandemic.
The country’s 8th graders also lost ground in science, erasing the average growth students had made in the subject since 2009.
The results continue a trend that predates the pandemic: The nation’s lowest performers are falling even further behind. Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, called the findings “sobering.”
“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” he said at a Monday briefing with reporters. The latest 4th and 8th grade reading and math scores, released in January of this year, showed the same pattern.
Absenteeism is also up among high school seniors. Almost a third, 31%, said they missed three or more days of school in the previous month, compared with 26% in 2019.
Overall, 12th graders who took the test in 2024 were less prepared for college than their 2019 peers, according to NCES’ analysis of the scores. Only 35% met that bar in reading, compared with 37% in 2019, and 33% in math compared with 37% in 2019.
Results released amid uncertainty at the Institute for Education Sciences
These results come as operations at NCES, and its parent organization, the Institute for Education Sciences, face uncertainty following federal staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year.
Following these widespread reductions in force, representatives from the National Assessment Governing Board, the organization that sets policy for NAEP, announced some tests will shrink in scope over the next decade—though the main reading and math tests in 4th and 8th grade, which are required by law, will continue as scheduled.
In a press call days before the scores’ release, a senior NCES official said that the agency plans to hire additional staff to work on development and administration of NAEP assessments.
This latest round of results throws into sharp relief how crucial it is to have the test—the only nationally comparable assessment of student abilities on this scale—for identifying persistent trends, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
States tend to report proficiency rates, rather than achievement at different percentiles, he said. They also regularly change their tests and proficiency cutoffs.
“Through all of that noise, it would have been very hard to recognize this pattern,” Kane said, referencing the widening gulf between high- and low-performers across multiple grades and subject areas.
In an emailed statement, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the “devastating trend” offered a clear lesson.
“Success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested,” she said. “That’s why President Trump and I are committed to returning control of education to the states so they can innovate and meet each school and students’ unique needs.”
Still, many researchers and school finance experts say trends in NAEP scores are notoriously difficult to link to specific policy changes, including funding decisions.
High school seniors ‘are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills’
In both math and reading, 12th graders’ scores fell several points since 2019: three points in math on a 300-point scale, and three points in reading on a 500-point scale.
In both subjects, these drops continue a steady pattern of decline that began in 2013, driven in large part by the lowest-performing students—those scoring at the 10th and 25th percentile. This year, though, students at all performance levels except the very highest saw statistically significant score declines.
More students than ever before are now performing at the lowest levels in both math and reading.
“This means students are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago,” said Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of NAGB. (The trend is evident in adults’ reading and math abilities, too. International tests of literacy and numeracy show American adults’ scores falling, and the gap between the highest- and lowest-performers widening.)
NAEP’s lowest achievement level is “basic,” which signals “partial mastery” of the content that students need to do grade-level work. Twelfth graders performing at this level are usually able to, for instance, determine the probabilities of simple events from 2-way tables in math, and find relevant details in a text to support its main point.
Large portions of American students can’t do these tasks. Forty-five percent of 12th graders are below NAEP’s threshold for “basic” performance in math, while 32% of students are below the same cutoff in reading.
Stagnating reading achievement, even before the current NAEP release, demonstrates that schools need to be doing something differently for their adolescent readers, said Rebecca Kockler, the executive director of Reading Reimagined, a program of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, a national nonprofit.
There’s a misconception that students are done developing reading skills by the end of 3rd grade, after which they “read to learn,” Kockler said. “That statement has done a lot of harm to our understanding of what kids need.”
In middle and high school, struggling readers need to be evaluated for more advanced word-reading skills that they need to access higher-level text, and interventions should target combinations of skills, applied in grade-level text—practices that aren’t commonplace, Kockler said.
Factors outside of instruction likely play a role, too, said Kane. “There are lingering effects of the pandemic in terms of absenteeism,” he said. “The pre-pandemic evidence of the impact of absenteeism on achievement was strong—not just for the students who were absent, but for their classmates.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, America’s high school seniors also feel slightly less confident in their reading and math abilities than they did in 2019, with the percentage of students who have “high” confidence in their reading skills dropping from 73% to 71% between 2019 and 2024, and the percentage of students who said the same in math dropping from 38% to 36% during the same time period.
Science scores show ‘we need to do more,’ experts say
In science, scores declined for 8th graders across the board—those performing at the lowest and highest levels.
Students performing at lower levels saw steeper drops than their peers at higher levels, though, widening the achievement gap to the largest it’s been in any 8th grade NAEP science administration since the test adopted its current science framework in 2009.
The loss demonstrates that “we need to do more,” said Beverly DeVore-Wedding, the president of the National Science Teaching Association.
Science has long been marginalized in elementary schools, a reality that robs many kids of the foundation they need to tackle more complex science topics later on, she said.
“The higher-achieving students are coming into schools and tests with more experience seeing science and doing science [at home],” she said. “The research shows that if you have more science starting pre-K, kindergarten, it engages students, it increases their interest in school, it increases their math and literacy performance.”
Girls’ scores also declined further than boys’ scores, reopening a gender achievement gap in the subject that had closed by 2019.
The data point echoes another recent study from the testing group NWEA, which analyzed its interim test data from about 2 million 8th graders, finding boys outperformed girls in the subject.
It’s possible that some of the initiatives schools had in place to encourage girls in STEM were lost in the shuffle of pandemic-era learning, said Karen Peterson, the chief executive officer for the National Girls Collaborative, an initiative that seeks to engage more girls in STEM.
“When the education system was disrupted, our original thoughts about this were that some of the extra things teachers might have been doing, having role models come in, having days focused on careers, … those went by the wayside,” Peterson told Education Week in May.
