Results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are not encouraging, according to article in The 74.
The alarming results are consistent with earlier iterations of NAEP and highlight decade-long trends of both stagnation in overall academic growth and growing disparities between top students and their struggling classmates.
The so-called Nation’s Report Card shows further deterioration in student scores. Both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading — not just compared with the status quo of 2019, but also the most recent round of the exam, which was conducted during the heart of the pandemic. Math scores were flat for eighth graders and up slightly for fourth graders, but those gains were predominantly driven by the progress of high-performing students.
“We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic,” says Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit the benchmark.
The report card underlines a growing divide between high- and low-performing students. Lower-scoring students are experiencing more significant declines. The overall picture indicates that many students are still struggling, particularly in reading. One-third of eighth graders scored below the NAEP “basic” level.
The highest-achieving test takers continued to pull away, or at least hold steady, while lower-performing children lost yet more ground. In fourth-grade reading, only participants testing at the 90th percentile staved off a drop in scores; those at the 50th percentile fell by two points, and those at the 10th percentile experienced a four-point slip. In eighth-grade math, scores at the 90th percentile jumped by three points since 2022, while those at the 10th percentile fell by five points.
Ethnic lines are another disparity. Eighth graders from most demographic groups were statistically unchanged in reading in the last two years, but Hispanic students fell by five points on average, by eight points for those at the 25th percentile, and by three points even for better-than-average participants at the 75th percentile.
About two-thirds of eighth graders exceeded NAEP’s “Basic” level of achievement in reading, fewer than in 1992. Thirty-three percent of students about to head into high school placed below the Basic threshold, the most in the history of the exam.
Despite the abundance of bad news, some positive signs indicate the beginnings of a turnaround in math learning.
Fourth graders climbed upwards by two points in the subject over the last two years, after dropping by five points between 2019 and 2022. While falling somewhat short of a major stride — again, higher-scoring students enjoyed significant gains, while those at the bottom of the distribution did not — it marks the first sign of post-pandemic progress on NAEP.
It is critical to track year-to-year fluctuations in math scores, says Bob Hughes, director of American K–12 education programs at the Gates Foundation. Beyond tracking, national leaders in government and philanthropy need to focus more on the broader development of better tools and strategies to deliver math instruction, he says. Compared with the decade-long development of a consensus by educators around the science of reading, now used in a dozens of states around the country, no similar consensus exists for math, he argues.
“I don’t think the technology is positioned now to be a magic bullet in solving some of the challenges we see on NAEP,” Hughes says. “But there are some promising developments that, over time, should help us accelerate achievement amongst even students that are the farthest from standard.”
Among results for individual states and school districts, often closely watched for exceptions to national or regional trends, comparatively few distinctions were evident. Fifteen states, mostly clustered in the Northeast and South, enjoyed a significant bounce in fourth-grade math compared with 2022 (Nebraska was the sole state in which scores declined over the last two years); still, only Alabama elementary schoolers are now farther along in the subject than similarly aged students in 2019.
John White, who served as Louisiana’s superintendent of schools from 2012 to 2020, adds that the “jarring” results for the nation as a whole cannot be attributed solely to the hangover of COVID learning loss.
“We have to look deep within the test results, and across a broad range of factors inside and outside of schools, to come to a stronger hypothesis than we have today,” he says. “That should be a national priority, and if national leaders don’t lead it, prominent state and city leaders should.”
The 74
