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“The question is: What’s going to happen for these kids over the next years of their lives?”Ĭhildren born now will, hopefully, attend school without the kinds of major, national disruptions that children who were in school during the pandemic faced. “That’s the wrong question,” Reardon said. Researchers, both at NCES and outside of the agency, emphatically say yes.īut will it take another 20 years to raise scores once again? Students scores by 2020 were the result of years of increases, including big jumps during the late 1990s through mid-2000s. It’s easy to ask: Is an average loss of less than 10 points in each case really that big of a deal on a scale of hundreds?

Reading scale scores dropped from 220 to 215 math scores dropped from 241 to 234. “It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunted the academic growth of this age group of children,” she said.īut it can be hard to understand exactly what these score declines mean from looking at the numbers alone. Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, called the score drops “sobering.”

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Here are five key takeaways from the data release, how to make sense of the findings, and what NAEP can-and can’t-illuminate about the effects of the past two years.

But NAEP data are notoriously hard to interpret. The results underscore the steep challenge ahead for schools as the 2022-23 year begins. The declines represent the largest drops in decades. Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 9-year-old students scored, on average, five points lower in reading and seven points lower in math in 2022 than did their pre-pandemic peers in 2020. Recently, new national data confirmed what educators, parents, and other studies have warned about for months: The pandemic has massively disrupted students’ learning.

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