NAEP Winners and Losers

Breaking down the scores

As I wrote for The 74 this week, “Across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas, American achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling ever since.”

With the latest round of NAEP results out this week, the story really hasn’t changed much. On average, scores rose in 4th grade math, but they dipped slightly in 8th grade math and fell two points in both 4th and 8th grade reading.

If you want to hear more about these trends, join me and Jessica Baghian from Watershed Advisors on Monday at 10am ET. We’ll be breaking down the data and highlighting bright spots. (I’d also recommend Watershed’s Dashboard tool, which lets you quickly break down trends across grades, subjects, and student groups.) That webinar will be a more serious affair, but but here’s my quick rundown of five winners and five losers this week.

Winners

Mississippi

The “Mississippi Miracle” is alive and well. Over the last ten years, Mississippi is the only state to make gains across all performance levels in 4th grade reading. While the bottom was falling out in most states, with the scores of low-performing students falling 10 or 20 or even 30 points, the scores of the lowest-performing students in Mississippi rose 9 points. While scores have been flat or declining in many parts of the country, Mississippi students continue to rise.

Mississippi now has the 7th-highest 4th grade reading scores overall, but they’re #1 for low-income students, #3 for Black students, and tied for #1 for Hispanic students.

Louisiana

While Mississippi might win the prize for 10-year gains, Louisiana might win for the biggest improvements recently. It was the closest state to recovering from COVID-related declines in 8th grade reading and math, and it was the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019.

The Honesty Gap

Because of its nationally comparable data, NAEP serves as a check on states that fiddle around with their cut scores to make it appear like students are doing better than they are. And indeed, Oklahoma and Wisconsin made headlines last year when they saw double-digit increases in the percentage of students who met their state proficiency bar. But those were greatly exaggerated.

Compared to 2022, Wisconsin 8th graders actually did make some gains on the NAEP math test, with an increase of 4 points in the percentage of students meeting the proficiency bar. Meanwhile, the state test claimed a 21% gain over the same time. Similarly, Oklahoma claimed a 10% increase in proficiency rates, while NAEP found just a 1% increase.

NAGB staff

The team at the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) did an excellent job explaining the results and reminding people what they meant. I particularly appreciated seeing the sample questions students faced and seeing the concepts that students might have struggled with in different grades and subjects. I strongly recommend anyone interested in these to go play around withe NAEP Questions Tool.

Education reporters

I thought education reporters did a good job telling both the overall story and the notable declines among the lowest-performers. The stories were quick and clear and featured some memorable quotes. My two favorites:

“I don’t know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they’re bad….I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.”—Dan Goldhaber, as told to The Washington Post

And:

“The rich get richer and the poor are getting shafted." —Scott Marion, as told to The Hechinger Report

Losers

The NAEP website

This is a personal gripe. I don’t know about anybody else, but I could not download any data on release day. I just kept getting the scrolling wheel of doom. By Friday, everything seemed to be working normally, but it was a frustrating experience on my end. And maybe it’s just me, but I miss the old days when I could download one big .pdf file with all the key data. The interactive data visualizations are great when they work, but they’re super annoying when they don’t.

Mainstream media outlets

For kicks on Wednesday morning I went looking at each of the websites for the NY Times, WSJ, and Washington Post. They all had their NAEP stories somewhere on the front page of their website, but you had to really look for them. The NY Times had its version buried way down underneath some story about times when Saturday Night Live actors made each other laugh (screenshot courtesy of my friend Dale Chu).

The NAEP release didn’t make the front page of the physical New York Times or WSJ. Instead, the Times made space for a blurb on the Mona Lisa painting getting a new room, and the Journal covered some controversy about an advertisement involving actress Nicole Kidman. The Post did mention it but buried it at the bottom of the page right next to a piece on the ancient art of stilt walking:

In my opinion, America’s achievement score declines are an urgent problem, and they are particularly bad news with the end of the federal ESSER funds. But apparently the editors at our largest national newspapers don’t agree with me.

Joe Biden, Miguel Cardona, the AFT and the NEA

Joe Biden, Miguel Cardona, and the national teachers unions bet big on the idea that money would be enough to help get kids back on track after the lengthy COVID-19 school closures. They never really had much of an agenda outside of more money and more staff, and they continued with that agenda even as evidence continued to mount about the decline in student achievement, the rise in student absenteeism, and the lowering of standards in American public schools.

And indeed, thanks to strong state budgets and $190 billion in federal relief funds, school spending did hit all-time highs. In turn, schools turned that money into all-time highs in per-student staffing levels. Schools have more teachers, guidance counselors, paraprofessionals, administrators, and psychologists than ever before. NAEP scores declined despite those spending and staffing increases.

To be clear, I don’t think the money harmed student achievement. That would be very surprising. In fact, the best evidence we have at the moment, from two teams of well-regarded researchers, suggests that the money did indeed boost student achievement. In other words, the achievement declines would have been much worse if schools didn’t have the money and the staff.

Still, Democrats are going to need a better line than just “more money.” That will be a tough argument to win in the current environment.

“No such thing as learning loss”

This isn’t just a COVID story anymore, but anyone who doubted the harmful effects that prolonged school closures would have on kids should feel chastened by the latest results. The kids who need school the most were harmed the most, and they have become the most disengaged from school.

I don’t have the exact quote, but Harvard professor and Vice Chair of the NAGB Board Marty West noted that it was a mistake to think that kids would just bounce back once they returned to school in person. In metaphorical terms, schooling is more like a treadmill than a trampoline, and once kids got off it there hasn’t been an easy way to get them back up to speed.

Low-performing kids

I have deeper, state-level analyses on this coming for The 74. But in the meantime let me just show you the national stats since 2013:

4th grade reading

Top 10 percent: Down 1 point

Bottom 10 percent: Down 15 points

8th grade math

Top 10 percent: Down 2 points

Bottom 10 percent: Down 18 points

I’m going to end this here. This is why I do the work that I do, and it makes me sick to see how much the bottom has dropped out on American achievement scores in recent years. They’re the ultimate losers in another round of depressing NAEP scores.