National education news: Down, but why?

This week’s roundup of national education news is focused on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Wednesday’s release of the 2024 Nation’s Report Card brought grim news.

TL;DR: Results are down in reading, mixed in math, and below 2019 levels across the board. The lowest-performing students suffered the greatest declines.

The question the morning after is: Why is this happening?

Test results themselves cannot definitively answer which events, policies or teaching practices are responsible for falling student achievement.

Each of the hypotheses floating around falls short as a full explanation. But leading suspects include:

The pandemic

There is no question COVID-19 and extended school closures hurt student learning. There is little doubt that even after students returned to school, the constant churn of quarantines and chronic absenteeism continued to disrupt learning.

Why it falls short: This can’t be the whole story. The most worrying trend lines — flat to declining test scores and widening gaps between the highest and lowest achievers — predate the pandemic. The high-water mark for most indicators of American student achievement sits around 2013.

The economy

Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has long posited that the Great Recession hurt student learning. It fueled budget cuts in school systems around the country, not to mention job losses that disrupted students’ lives and wellbeing.

Why it falls short: Sustained economic growth, briefly interrupted by the pandemic, does not appear to have fueled a learning recovery. And America has fared far better economically in recent years than many European countries, which seem to be suffering fewer academic declines.

The accountability retreat

In 2015, Congress eased federal school accountability mandates. This weakened incentives for school administrators to focus on raising student achievement — particularly for low performers. Tim Daly, Chad Aldeman and others have argued relaxed rules led to weaker outcomes.

Why it falls short: Accountability is now largely up to the states, and some states are holding the line on high standards and real consequences for schools that don’t meet them. More careful research would need to examine whether students in these states are faring better.

The culture

Perhaps weakened accountability policies are downstream of a broader cultural trend that overtook education reform: a retreat from high expectations and an abandonment of the norm that educators take full responsibility for the intellectual development of students in their care. No excuses. This is the argument Steven Wilson makes in a forthcoming book, previewed in a blistering presentation at the American Enterprise Institute.

Why it falls short: Culture is inherently amorphous and hard to measure. But it’s hard to imagine that a cultural retreat from merit and high expectations looks the same in New York and Boston as in, say, Brownsville, Texas, or the same on the ed reform leadership circuit as in Middle American classrooms. Among states, Oregon is a poster child for lowered expectations and ranks dead last in the demographically adjusted 2024 NAEP results published by the Urban Institute. But results in the other 49 states don’t map to a clear-cut cultural pattern.

The phones

Jonathan Haidt is among those who pinpoint 2012, when cellphones and social networking became ubiquitous features of young people’s lives, as an inflection point for many negative trends affecting young people — including declines in mental health, focus and academic achievement.

Why it falls short: The rise of smartphones is a global phenomenon. As Nat Malkus and others have demonstrated, the U.S.’s test score declines and widening achievement gaps far exceed those in other industrialized nations.

The standards

Theodore Rebarber and Neal McCluskey have argued the Common Core State Standards, adopted by nearly every state in their heyday, embraced “progressive” approaches to math instruction that de-emphasized simple skills like multiplication tables in favor of narrative explanations and big-picture concepts. This may have accelerated a broader shift away from explicitly teaching students things like spelling words or state capitals. Cognitive science research suggests now-unfashionable “rote memorization” may help students solve complex problems, because when they can recall facts quickly and easily, they have more mental bandwidth to tackle complicated questions.

Why it falls short: States that abandoned Common Core, or steered clear to begin with, don’t appear immune to falling achievement. Besides, this kind of pedagogical push and pull has gone on for decades, and policy debates over standards and curriculum tend to hold limited sway over what actually happens once teachers close their classroom door.

There likely is no single story that explains the dismal state of student achievement in 2025. The real question is: what now?

Get smart in three charts

Mardi Gras miracle: In 49 states, March 4 will be Tuesday. In one, it’ll be Mardi Gras. This chart from The 74 shows Louisiana is suis generis in another way. It’s the only state where fourth graders showed statistically significant reading improvement over the past five years.

Chart by The 74, a nonprofit media outlet focused on education.

Savage inequalities: A gulf between the highest- and lowest-scoring students has widened since 2019, erasing decades of progress closing achievement gaps. Fourth grade reading results illustrate the pattern. The highest-scoring 10% of students are treading water. The median student has slipped. The lowest-scoring 10% of students have slipped twice as far.

2024 NAEP percentiles
Source: Nation’s Report Card

The children left behind: The falling floor beneath student results also means record shares of students lack basic literacy skills.

Source: Nation’s Report Card

The Hechinger Report offers a soberingly concrete description of what this means: “Forty percent of fourth graders cannot put events from a story into sequential order, and one third of eighth graders cannot determine the meaning of a word in the context of a reading passage.” As Dan Goldhaber notes, this could doom large swaths of students to harder lives after graduation.

What meaning do you think we should make of these results? I’d love to hear what you think.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is senior director of thought leadership and growth at Step Up For Students. He lives in Sanford, Florida, with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.