American kids' worsening reading skills signal continued fallout from school closures

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of American students' knowledge and capability in math, reading, science, and writing — released its 2024 assessment, also called the "Nation's Report Card," on Wednesday. The results were bleak.

Last year, the average reading score for both fourth- and eighth-grade students nationwide was two points lower than in 2022 and five points lower than the score for 2019.

According to the NAEP report card that relies on an assessment of hundreds of thousands of kids, the 2024 reading scores for fourth-grade students were lower at four of the five selected percentiles — namely the 10th, 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles — compared to 2022 percentile scores. When it came to eighth-grade students, their grades were lower at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles compared to scores in 2022.

Only 38% of eighth-grade students demonstrated "solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter." When factoring in grade eight students who also scored at a basic reading level, the number was 67%, which the Wall Street Journal indicated is the lowest share since testing began in 1992.

Chalkbeat noted that all of the kids who took the exam last year had some of their education impacted by the pandemic — a period during which students were kept out of classrooms at the urging of teachers' unions in what became the longest interruption in schooling since formal education became the norm.

The National Education Union, one of the guilty parties, called for all schools to be shut down in spring of 2020, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exempted them. The union's president, Becky Pringle, reportedly made over $500,000 while fighting to keep schools closed between September 2020 and August 2021.

Blaze News previously reported that American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten, also instrumental in keeping kids out of the classroom, called the first Trump administration's proposal to reopen in-person learning in 2020 "reckless" and "cruel." While the AFT resisted a return to working in schools, which had altogether received $190 billion in COVID-19 relief money, union affiliates joined in, staging sick-outs, which were in some cases illegal.

'This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.'

It was clear early on in the pandemic that the school closures were going to adversely impact generations of kids.

The University of Toronto released a report in July 2021 acknowledging that "available evidence shows that school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic could have lasting effects on educational outcomes and widen achievement gaps."

German researchers determined in a 2021 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that student achievement was negatively impacted by school closures, especially among younger students and students from poor families.

In addition to derailing young Americans' academics, the school closures also prompted spikes in mental illness, suicide, obesity, and diminished immune systems.

"The news is not good," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said Tuesday. "Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels."

'This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies.'

Carr suggested that the decline in average reading ability could not "be blamed solely on the pandemic" but admitted that there has been a "widening achievement gap in this country, and it has worsened since the pandemic."

"Student joy for reading is declining. We know that teachers are not asking as much for essay responses to questions," Carr reportedly said when identifying other contributing factors, which included absenteeism. "Students are also reading on devices. They're not reading the kind of passages on devices that maybe you and I did years ago."

Martin West, vice chair of the NAEP governing board and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Chalkbeat, "We have a larger-than-in-recent-memory share of American students who are failing to demonstrate even partial mastery of the types of skills educators have defined as important."

"That doesn't bode well for their futures or for our collective futures," said West.

"I don't know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they're bad," Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research, told the Washington Post. "I don't think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine."

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement, "When we fail our children, we fail our nation's future. Today's NAEP scores continue the concerning trend of declining performance nationwide. This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies rather than helping students learn and grow."

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