Ahead of the Nation’s Report Card release early next year, state assessment reports and researchers suggest disappointment.
Math and reading scores across the nation continue to decline or remain stagnant nearly five years after the COVID-19 pandemic stalled classroom learning, recent state assessment results indicate.
Most states have released their annual report card summaries for the 2023–2024 academic year. One of the latest,
New York’s, shows that the average reading/English Language Arts among public school students in third through eighth grade was 46 percent, a 2 percent drop from the year prior. In math, the average proficiency rate for the same grade levels was 54 percent, a 2 percent increase from the 2022–2023 academic year.
The New York Department of Education defines proficiency as competency over challenging subject matter. Its recent report card doesn’t include chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates, but last year’s report listed those as 26.4 percent and 88.3 percent, respectively.
JP O’Hare, speaking for New York’s Department of Education, said the state report card is only one of multiple measures of learning and “cannot tell the whole story of student proficiency.”
“Results can be used to determine whether there is a need for additional support in school and can also help teachers in their instructional planning. Parents may use the results of the state assessments to monitor their child’s learning and inform conversations with their child’s teacher about how their child is progressing in their grade level,” O’Hare said in a Nov. 14
statement.The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act
requires states and districts to publish a report card noting annual state assessment results. In most states, the results for individual school buildings can also be accessed online.
Math and reading/ELA scores for elementary and middle school students are the most common indicators for measuring academic growth, though science and social studies test scores across middle school and high school grades are included in the reports. Some states also provide summaries of Regents exams and SAT and ACT scores.
Of the four largest states, Texas is the only one that has yet to release an updated state report card.
California’s report
card indicated that 47.04 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 met or exceeded ELA standards last year, and 35.54 percent of students in the same grades met or exceeded math standards. For both subject areas, the latest results show less than a 1 percent performance increase in one year but still below 2018–2019 scores.
The Golden State’s high school graduation rate was nearly 87 percent—the highest rate in six years—and its chronic absenteeism rate has declined since 2021.
“Across California, we’re seeing that when we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities, all students reap the rewards. Our migrant students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students show marked improvements in consistent school attendance and graduation rates, reflecting the dedication of our educators and students alike,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said in a Nov. 21
statement.
Florida
reported that its graduation rate last year was 88 percent, while 55.7 percent of students across the state scored at or above grade level for ELA and 57.5 percent for math. Scores in both subject areas also increased from the previous year.
The Nation’s Report Card,
published by the U.S. Department of Education, includes average nationwide test scores for math, reading, writing, science, U.S. history, the arts, and civics. The previous report was published in 2022, and the next one will be released early next year. Its most recent
data indicates that reading and math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nonprofit K–12 assessment and research organization, works with state education departments and school districts across the country to develop state tests, administer supplemental tests to measure progress within one academic year, and identify areas where teachers can improve instruction. It also determined that public education has not improved since the pandemic.
Based on tests that NWEA administered to 7.7. million students across grades 3 through 8 in all 50 states, the average U.S. student who hasn’t entered high school yet needs almost five months of additional schooling in reading/ELA and about four months to return to pre-pandemic progress and achievement levels, according to its
study completed ahead of this school year.
“We never caught up,” Karyn Lewis, NWEA vice president of research and policy partnerships, told The Epoch Times. “We have a compounding debt situation.”
NWEA’s report says that during the 2023–2024 school year (early fall to late spring), average reading scores declined by 36 percent and math scores by 18 percent. The largest plummet for math was at the fifth-grade level, while middle school ELA scores indicate that most students didn’t have the vocabulary knowledge and decoding skills to read words when they finished elementary school.
“Throughout the pandemic, we have often believed that we were finished with COVID before it was finished with us, and this is yet another example of that. Pandemic fatigue is real, but accepting a new normal of lower achievement and widened inequities is not an option,” the report says.
Lewis said high-dosage tutoring and summer school programs could be effective ways for learning recovery if teachers are not afraid to tell parents how far behind their kids have fallen academically and if parents are willing to make sure their kids do the extra work needed when school is in recess.
“They need to communicate the level of need,” she said.
