Math Scores Have Fallen off a Cliff

The bottom has fallen out

According to new international test results out this week, American students are not doing well in math or science. They’ve lost significant ground over time, more than students in other developed countries, and the losses are worse for lower-performing students than they are for our highest performers.

If you want the details, I’d recommend this write-up from The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, or you can dig into the full results here.

The graph below tells the ugly story. It shows 4th grade math results over time. As you can see, scores were rising in the late 1990s and 2000s, and those gains were broadly shared across student performance levels. As of 2011, scores were rising across the board, and the gap between the highest- and lowest-performers was shrinking.

But then something happened. Scores peaked and started to fall, especially for our lower-performing students. People might want to focus on the COVID-related declines (the far righthand side of the graph), but this isn’t just a COVID story.

I’ve written about these trends before, and AEI’s Nat Malkus has documented similar patterns in our national tests in reading, history, and civics.

The latest results come from 2023, and students have made some progress off their post-pandemic lows. But those gains have been small and not enough to erase the gaps. So what can be done to accelerate achievement? There are a lot of options, but I’d start with two things:

One, we need a lot more political leadership acknowledging this problem and proposing solutions to get kids back on track. Too many policymakers have been putting their heads in the sand and hoping the problem fixes itself. As Todd Truitt highlights here, Virginia is a leader on this right now. They’re using policy to drive local leaders to pay more attention to accelerating math pathways for students who demonstrate they’re ready for it.

I’m biased, but I think the Collaborative for Student Success has been doing some of the best work on this. They’ve highlighted some of the cultural barriers to improving math performance, and their March Mathness competition (which I participated in) highlighted 16 of the most promising policy interventions in the country.

Two, we should be celebrating and trying to understand the places that are having success. In a new piece out this week, I worked with The 74’s Eamonn Fitzmaurice to highlight districts that are getting exceptional results in 8th grade math. The chart below shows the Virginia results. I’ve highlighted the results for Wise County, a relatively higher-poverty district located near the Kentucky border. It has much higher poverty rates than the more well-known D.C. suburbs (where I live), yet it topped our Virginia rankings in both reading and math.

There are stories like this in every state. I haven’t had a chance to dive into all of those yet, but I hope others will use our interactive tool to get started. Check out the full story to see which districts in your state are getting the best results in math.

Ultimately, reversing our nation’s recent declines in math will take a lot of work. But it is possible to improve math performance, and to do it for all kids at the same time. We’ve done it before, and now we need to do it again.