SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The mother of all report cards is out today - the Nation's Report Card, that is. Every two years, the assessment gives us a sense of how students are doing in subjects like math and reading. The latest data comes five years after a pandemic that massively disrupted learning. The results give us a sense of how much students have since been able to recover. And to be frank, they're not great. NPR education reporter Jonaki Mehta has been sifting through the data for us and is here to explain more. Hey, there.
JONAKI MEHTA, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Nice to have you on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MEHTA: It's great to be here.
DETROW: Before we get into the results, can you give us a sense of what the Nation's Report Card actually measures?
MEHTA: Yeah, so the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, as we call it - it's really consider the gold standard as far as student achievement tests go. It covers a bunch of subjects, but every other year, a big sample of fourth and eighth graders across the country are tested in the big ones - math and reading. And the results from 2022 were really the first ones that we got after the pandemic, and they were dire. So this time, the hope was that kids would rebound from the pandemic and, really, they did not.
DETROW: We're talking about two subjects here - math and reading. Never in my life have I picked math over reading...
MEHTA: (Laughter).
DETROW: ...But we'll do it here. Walk us through how students did in math.
MEHTA: Well, I personally love math. But I'm happy to start there 'cause it sounds like a lot of other students do, too. We have some good news there. On average, fourth graders who took the test about a year ago - they did better in math in 2024 than they did in 2022.
DETROW: OK.
MEHTA: And if you look at the scores on average for eighth grade, they held steady between that same time period. But Scott, if you really dig into the data, what's troubling is that the lowest performers and the highest performers - the gap between them is widening. And it's also really important to note that both grades are still doing worse than before the pandemic in 2019. There was actually only one state where fourth graders improved in math compared to before COVID, and that's Alabama.
DETROW: Oh, interesting. Any other ideas of - or thoughts as to why eighth graders did worse than fourth graders here?
MEHTA: So that's the thing that, you know - about the Nation's Report Card is it sheds light on where students are at academically, but there aren't a lot of whys here. It doesn't explain much. But I did talk to Lisa Ashe. She's a math specialist. She's on the National Assessment Governing Board.
LISA ASHE: One of the things that I think about is that today's eighth graders were in fourth grade when they were sent home to do at-home learning. So I think that had an impact.
MEHTA: So basically, what she's saying is fourth graders who just took the test were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit. And she says, maybe they were able to better respond to accelerated learning when they got back in school than the students who are now in eighth grade.
DETROW: So what about reading then?
MEHTA: So reading is mostly bad news. On average, students in both grades did a lot worse than they have in a long time. I spoke to the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Peggy Carr. She oversees the Nation's Report Card.
PEGGY CARR: Our lowest performers today are scoring lower than our lower performers did 30 years ago. That's how low these scores historically have dropped.
MEHTA: And Scott, you can hear just how concerned she is about that fact. It's true of both fourth and eighth graders. But Carr also did point out, once again, there is some hope in reading, and this time it's in Louisiana. Fourth graders there did better than they did in 2019 this time around. So we got to do - we got to figure out what they're doing right there.
DETROW: Broadly, though, across the whole country, is this, again, just all about the pandemic, do we think?
MEHTA: No. That's really important. It certainly did not help, but declines in math and reading started well before COVID, and education researchers aren't exactly sure why. But here's the thing. In the past few years, a lot of states and districts have revamped reading instruction to be more based in research. And so we'll be watching in the coming years to see if that helps students turn a pretty big corner.
DETROW: Jonaki Mehta, thanks so much.
MEHTA: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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