National test results released on Thursday drew attention very clearly to the devastating effects the pandemic has had on American schoolchildren. The performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading has dropped to the levels of two decades ago.
This year, for the first time since tests on the National Assessment of Educational Progress began recording student achievement, the 9-year-olds took a step backwards in math. Meanwhile, reading grades had the biggest drop in more than 30 years.
The decline spanned nearly all races and income levels and was markedly worse for the lowest-achieving students. The best performing students, among the top 90%, had a small drop – three points in math – but the students in the weakest 10% dropped 12 points.
“I was amazed at the scope and magnitude of the setback,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that administered the exam this year. The tests were taken by a national sample of 14,800 9-year-olds and were compared with the results of tests taken by students of the same age group in early 2020, just before the pandemic took hold in the United States.
Higher and lower achieving students were already drifting away even before the pandemic, but now, Carr said, “students at the bottom are dropping faster.”
Black students lost 13 points in math, compared to five points for white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect of school closures on low-income students and black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue distance learning for longer periods of time.
The drop in test scores means that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they read, fewer of them can deduce a character’s feelings from what they read. In mathematics, students may be privy to simple arithmetic facts, but fewer of them can add fractions with common denominators.
Setbacks can have serious consequences for a generation of children who need to advance beyond the basics of elementary school to be able to advance later.
“Students’ test scores, even beginning in grades 1, 2, and 3, are fairly accurate indicators of these students’ later school performance and overall educational trajectory,” commented Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, who works with educational disparity.
“The biggest cause for concern is the drop in grades of the lowest-achieving children,” she added. Being so late, she said, can lead to them becoming disinterested in school, reducing their chances of completing high school or making it to college.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is seen as the gold standard in educational assessments. Unlike state tests, which are standardized across the country, it remains consistent over time and does not seek to hold individual schools accountable for results, which experts say makes it more reliable.
The test results offered a snapshot of just one age group: 9-year-olds, who are typically in third or fourth grade. Results for fourth and eighth graders will be released later this year in each state.
“This is a test that clearly shows federal and state leaders how hard we need to work,” said Andrew Ho, a professor of education at Harvard, a specialist in educational assessments and a former member of the exam’s oversight board.
Since the exam was first held in the early 1970s, reading and especially math scores have risen or stayed the same. This includes a period of great progress between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s.
But over the last ten years or so, student grades have been flat rather than rising, and the disparities between the lowest and highest performing students have widened.
Then came the pandemic, which closed schools across the country practically from one moment to the next. Teachers began teaching classes via Zoom, and students stayed at home, struggling to learn online.
In some parts of the country, interruptions were short-lived, and schools reopened in the fall of that year. But in other regions, especially in large cities with large populations of low-income, non-white students, schools were closed for many months. Some only fully reopened last year.
The national exams, Ho said, tell the story of a decade of progress, followed by a decade of inequality and then the shock of the pandemic, which unfolded in two parts.
“It canceled out the progress made and exacerbated inequality,” Ho said. “Now we have a lot of work ahead of us to recover what was lost.”
Ho estimated that one point lost on the national exam equates to roughly three weeks of learning. That means a high-performing student who lost three points in math can catch up in nine weeks, but a low-performing student who lost 12 points will need 36 weeks, or nearly nine months, to catch up — and even then it will lag behind its more advanced peers.
There are indications that students, who have already returned to school completely, have already started to learn at a normal pace again. But experts say it will take more than the usual school day to make up for the gaps created by the pandemic.
The results should mobilize everyone to focus on the effort to get students back on track, said Janet K. Jackson, who until last year headed the Chicago Public Schools school district and now sits on the board of directors of Chiefs for Change, which represents school district and state school leaders. She called on the federal government to come up with grand proposals, evoking the Marshall Plan – the US initiative to help rebuild Europe after World War II.
“For me, the problem is very serious,” she said, noting that politicians, school leaders, teacher unions and student parents will have to put aside the many disagreements that have grown during the pandemic and join forces to help students recover. the lost ground.
