Reading and math scores on the nation’s report card show that students haven’t rebounded from the pandemic—and in some cases, achievement is still declining.
The grim news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released Wednesday, has prompted urgent calls from governors, state chiefs, and advocates across the education field for rapid, focused action to support students, especially those at the bottom of the achievement distribution.
“Test scores confirm students are still struggling, but that’s not the whole story,” said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat and the chair of the National Governors Association, in a statement on Wednesday.
“Reading and math scores were declining even before the pandemic—especially for the lowest-performing students,” Polis continued. “Our challenge isn’t just to get back to normal; it’s to reverse decades of deterioration.”
Why have scores on this national gauge of student achievement faltered over the last decade, and how can schools reverse that pattern? Those are complex, thorny questions.
NAEP results can show how students’ performance has changed over time, but they can’t explain why. For that reason, researchers have long cautioned against claiming that changes in scores are the result of specific policies.
Still, the lingering effects of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, and longer-term trends in state and federal education priorities, frame the context in which students take the test.
Education Week spoke with experts to dig into the factors that could be shaping the results.
Why haven’t we seen more pandemic recovery?
That’s a question that has been asked a lot given the unprecedented $190 billion investment from the federal government to help catch students up.
But at some level, it’s not that surprising that students haven’t seen more academic growth in the wake of the pandemic, said Susanna Loeb, the executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator, which aims to advance high-impact tutoring as an academic-recovery strategy.
It requires “a lot of effort, and focus, and expertise” to change schools in a way that would allow for students to make progress at a faster rate than they have before, she said.
“There are places that have made really concerted efforts to support students, but it isn’t that easy. If we could improve schools hugely, rapidly, we probably would have done it beforehand,” said Loeb.
Research has shown that the infusion of federal money into schools through COVID-relief funds contributed to academic progress, but hasn’t moved the needle far enough.
Some observers have argued that money alone isn’t enough, and states need to take a closer look at how their spending priorities affect outcomes.
“We need to follow the lead of states and districts that have done well and ensure that others emulate them,” said Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, in a statement. “States have been handed billions, yet remain out of compliance with federally mandated improvement plans while student performance plummets.”
Mike Petrilli, the president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, offered another reason why the 2024 NAEP test might be painting a particularly grim picture. The 4th graders who took the assessment last year were in kindergarten during the 2019-20 school year, and were likely some of the hardest-hit by school closures and disruptions, he noted.
“I do think that the youngest kids were most vulnerable, because they were learning to read when schools shut down,” Petrilli said.
During those first few months of the pandemic, kindergarten and 1st grade teachers said that teaching foundational reading skills like phonics—how letters represent spoken sounds—was nearly impossible to do with the improvised remote learning infrastructure their schools had set up.
Gaps in foundational reading skills can compound students’ reading difficulties over time, making it harder for them to do the kind of reading comprehension tasks that NAEP assesses.
Many of the pandemic’s other impacts still linger, too.
Chronic absenteeism soared in the immediate aftermath of school closures, and while NAEP student surveys show rates went down slightly in 2024 compared to 2022, they’re still higher than pre-pandemic averages. Higher rates of absenteeism are correlated with worse performance on NAEP.
Tackling absenteeism is a crucial step to ensuring that kids can make academic progress, said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a town hall on the results on Wednesday.
“You have to come to school to learn,” she said.
The downward trajectory in reading and math scores predates the pandemic. Do we know why?
Starting about a decade ago, NAEP scores started flattening—and gaps between the highest- and lowest-performers began to grow. While the pandemic accelerated these trends, it wasn’t their origin point.
There are no definitive answers as to what caused this slide, but there are trends in policy, and shifts in the broader world in which students live, that have unfolded along the same timeline.
As NAEP scores trended upward through the early 2000s, lower-performing students were gaining ground, closing the space with their higher-scoring peers. At that same time, states had begun introducing content standards and tests, a movement that reached its peak in 2002 when the No Child Left Behind Act, which required all states to adopt such a system, became law.
“There is good evidence, some of which uses NAEP data, that really does suggest a lot of that progress in the 1990s and 2000s was driven by test-based accountability,” said Martin West, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, and a professor of education at Harvard University, during the town hall discussion.
“That’s not to say that those systems didn’t have unintended consequences,” he added. (Teachers’ unions, school districts, and researchers have pointed to the crowding out of other important subjects, like civics, social studies, and science, for instance.)
Some have argued that the continued decline calls for a return to more aggressive accountability measures.
“We must restore our commitment to accountability for the academic achievement of all kids. Even before the pandemic, we began to lose the progress made in the early 2000s,” said Margaret Spellings, the former U.S. Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, who helped design the NCLB law, in a statement.
But other data complicate that explanation.
During the same period that U.S. students’ reading and math abilities have fallen, international tests show that American adults’ skills in these areas have declined, too.
These drops manifest across age groups, suggesting that test-takers’ K-12 education may not be the determining factor in their scores.
It’s possible that new modes of technology—social media and reading on screens—and changing trends in students’ reading habits could be driving some of the results, said West, in Wednesday’s town hall.
Fewer than half of 9-year-olds say they read for pleasure every day, a percentage that’s been falling over the past decade, according to data from the NAEP long-term trend study. And many researchers and educators have questioned whether too much screen time, too early, is hindering reading comprehension.
“I’m intrigued by the screens hypothesis, because I could imagine it being something that creates both declines at the bottom and accelerates the top,” West said, given that high-performing students might be more likely to use the internet as a tool to direct their own learning.
Why are some states—like Louisiana and Alabama—gaining ground at some grade levels?
In Alabama, 4th graders’ math scores were higher in 2024 than they were before the pandemic. The state passed legislation in 2022 that mandated math coaching for K-5 teachers and screening for elementary students struggling in the subject.
And Louisiana’s 4th graders are scoring higher in reading now than they were before the start of the pandemic—the only state that’s made statistically significant progress in that area since 2019.
The state’s superintendent of education, Cade Brumley, credited the increase to “the dedication of teachers and a laser focus on fundamental academic skills” in a statement on Wednesday.
Louisiana’s years-long focus on common curriculum sets it apart from other states, said John White, the state’s former superintendent of education.
Across the country, it’s common for the curriculum and materials that teachers use to vary district by district, or even classroom by classroom. But in Louisiana, the state department of education started publishing curriculum reviews in 2015 and created incentives for local districts to adopt products based in evidence. Professional learning and training for teachers was then designed around those materials, a connection that White said was essential to the state’s approach.
“You aren’t just trained to pilot an airplane. You’re trained to fly a Sandpiper vs. a 737. Even though they both are flying, they’re highly different in terms of the user experience,” said White, now the CEO at Great Minds, a curriculum company. “In order for a teacher to be able to translate the curriculum into specific pedagogical practices, the teacher has to make thousands of judgments a day. You can’t make those judgments in an agnostic way.”
Over the past five years, dozens of states have mandated large-scale changes to curriculum and instructional practices, aiming to better align teaching to the “science of reading.” But teachers in many districts have said they haven’t received enough training or time to put new approaches into practice.
For White, it’s not surprising that state legislation aimed at changing classroom practice hasn’t yet shifted outcomes—especially as the strength of states’ implementation varies, he said.
“The idea that you make a change in state policy that then impacts the pedagogical behaviors in what, in most cases, is literally tens of thousands of educators, and that this manifests in different skills and cognitive processes in hundreds of thousands or even millions of kids, and that this all manifests itself in a period of one or two years—that just doesn’t make sense,” White said.
Why are 4th grade math scores up, but 8th graders’ scores remain flat?
In one area of NAEP, 4th grade math, students’ scores have increased. But the average belies a more complicated picture—the lowest-performing students, those at or below the 25th percentile, haven’t made any growth.
Eighth graders experienced a similar pattern. The highest-achieving students continued to make gains, while the lowest-performing students lost more ground.
Overall, these results are “no reason for cheering,” said Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education in the United States program at the Gates Foundation, which has invested more than a billion dollars in improving math teaching and learning.
Middle school math presents some particular challenges, he said.
“Math builds upon itself,” said Hughes. “You need basic skills to then advance and master the next set of concepts.”
Just like in reading, students who aren’t fluent with key foundational skills—like the ability to think flexibly about numbers, or the ability to manipulate fractions—can see those gaps cause compounding deficits over time.