Education test scores show aftermath of pandemic school closures

» Education test scores show aftermath of pandemic school closures


Math and reading scores have still not recovered from COVID-19 pandemic-era school closures, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics and reading scores released Wednesday.

Reading scores among fourth and eighth graders, as well as eighth grade math scores, are as low as they have been in over two decades. Fourth grade math scores were the least affected following the pandemic, and they are the only scores that have seen any, albeit slight, recovery.

“The Nation’s Report Card is out and the news is not good,” National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters on Tuesday. “Overall, student achievement has not returned to prepandemic levels, so the struggle continues.”

“Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students,” Carr said in a press release. “Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”

Released just days into President Donald Trump’s second term, the dismal test scores could accelerate his education agenda to prioritize school choice programs and eliminate the Education Department by returning control of certain programs back to the states.

“The Trump Administration is committed to reorienting our education system to fully empower states, to prioritize meaningful learning, and provide universal access to high-quality instruction,” Trump’s Department of Education said in a statement. “Change must happen, and it must happen now.”

Carr, the center’s commissioner, told reporters that the disparity between higher-performing students and lower-performing students is widening, but that the results “cannot be just blamed on the pandemic. … This is not just a pandemic story.”

“The patterns are not yet evident why schools, for the most part, continue to perform below prepandemic levels,” Carr added. However, she said, “The data are clear: The students who don’t come to school are not improving … lower performers are not coming to school … there’s a strong relationship between absenteeism and performance.”

According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, chronic absenteeism more than doubled following the pandemic. In the 2019-2020 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate was 13%, and in 2021-2022, it was 28%. The rate was still as high as 26% in 2022-2023 after hovering between 13% and 15% from 2016 to 2020.

Pandemic-era school closures were supposed to limit the transmission of COVID-19. However, a new study from the Journal of Infection found that such policies had no meaningful impact on COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

Through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, Congress spent $189.5 billion to mitigate the “learning loss” caused by school closures. As evidenced by the 2022 and 2024 math and reading scores, the increased federal spending was unable to reverse the educational damage.

A Defense of Freedom Institute report took a deeper look into how the ESSER fund affected 2022 NAEP reading and math scores, and found that “ESSER dollars did not lead to statistically better NAEP scores in major cities; we observed the same at the state level,” and even “higher levels of per-pupil ESSER funding did not correlate with less severe learning loss.”

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“Despite the billions of dollars that the federal government invests in K-12 education annually, and the approximately $190 billion in federal pandemic funds, our education system continues to fail students across the nation,” the Department of Education statement said, calling the results “heartbreaking.”

The most optimistic finding from the 2024 results is that Louisiana and Alabama surpassed prepandemic scores on reading and mathematics, respectively. No other states experienced similar success.

The NAEP math and reading assessments were administered between January and March of 2024 and included participation from roughly 235,000 fourth-graders from about 6,100 schools and roughly 230,000 eighth-graders from approximately 5,400 schools.



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