The Nation’s Report Card is sparking calls to action as dismal scores on reading and math show students across the country have failed to recover from the pandemic.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data released Wednesday showed reading scores have fallen even further for fourth and eighth graders than in 2022, while math scores show only slight progress for fourth graders, but still not enough to catch up to pre-pandemic numbers.
“These results are both heartbreaking and tragic,” said Alicia Levi, president and CEO of Reading is Fundamental. “We need to take action […] We are calling on, leaders from all sectors, public and private, to join us in this fight.”
Increasing investment, preparing educators with new ways to teach subjects and acknowledging students are moving up grades without the fundamentals are all crucial for fixing the problems, according to experts.
Reading took the biggest hit, with the percentage of eighth graders able to read at NAEP’s basic line the lowest in the assessment’s history.
The news is even worse for the lowest-performing students: Those in just the 10th and 25th percentiles for both fourth and eighth grade had the lowest scores since NAEP’s first reading assessment in 1992.
Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, president of Mrs. Wordsmith, a group that seeks to improve children’s literacy outcomes, called it “a state of emergency.”
“We know that 70 percent of incarcerated people read below fourth grade level. We know that literacy is deeply tied to our economic opportunities and our health outcomes. So, particularly coming out of $190 billion in ESSER funds, it’s a tough day to hear that we have not made progress and actually lost ground in our reading proficiency across the country,” Cardet-Hernandez said.
Seeking to combat the problem, numerous school districts and states in recent years have required educators to switch how they teach reading to a method called the “science of reading.”
Previously, those educators used the “balanced literacy” method, which focused on teaching students how to read using cues or context in the text. The science of reading instead focuses on ensuring students understand phonics when learning to read.
Whether NAEP’s flagging scores are an indictment of the method cannot yet be determined, according to experts.
New York City, which holds the largest public school district in the country, switched to the science of reading in 2023, only giving one academic year with the concept before students were assessed by NAEP.
“It’s way too soon to have expected to see the trickle down from state level policy initiatives being implemented and then actually enacted at the school level in ways that would support faster development on the part of a student,” said Karyn Lewis, director of the Center for School and Student Progress at NWEA, an education research group.
“I think in education we are often way too reactionary and want to pull back before we have full evidence about whether a policy or an initiative is working,” Lewis added.
Math had somewhat better luck, though the scores are little cause for celebration.
Fourth graders had a two-point gain in math but were still unable to overcome the five-point drop that was seen in the subject when the pandemic began. Eighth graders had no significant changes in their math scores.
Math has been assisted by extra federal dollars going towards tutors and after-school programs, and critics say that type of energy was not put into reading.
“We’re not making the investment,” Levi said. “I see today that there is such public and private sector investment in STEM — the idea that science and math and technology are the future and that we need to double, triple, quadruple our investment — and you are seeing the results of that is reading has been left behind.”
Experts say reading is also just a harder subject to help play catch up on when students fall behind and how teachers are trained for this problem needs to change.
“We know that math is made of more discrete skills that are probably much easier to target for intervention,” Lewis said. “You can identify, for instance, that a student is struggling with long division, and then you know the specific steps to intervene there and get them caught up with that specific skill set. In contrast, reading is cumulative.”
Adult literacy has also fallen, according to numbers released last month.
The National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Department of Education, released data in December showing 28 percent of adults in the U.S. are ranked at the lowest levels of literacy, compared to 19 percent in 2017.
As students’ progress through the grades, reading goes from a subject that is taught to a subject that is assumed. After grade three, they are expected to be expanding their knowledge through reading in new subjects, and educators are not expected to teach how to read the material.
“I think we are seeing the effects of the fact that early elementary students, early elementary teachers, they’re the most well-prepared to teach those foundational skills,” said Lewis. “And we’ve got students leaving those early elementary grades missing some of those foundational skills due to the school disruptions, and they’re coming into the classroom of more advanced teachers who may not be prepared to support those foundational reading gaps.”
“I think we’re seeing a mismatch between the needs of students and the preparation of our teacher workforce,” she added.
