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News Brief
Wednesday June 21, 2023 9:24 am
National test scores plunged for 13-year-olds, according to new data that shows the largest math drop in 50 years, as the Washington Post reported, and no academic recovery from the pandemic.
Student scores plunged 9 points in math and 4 points in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card. The NAEP scores reflect testing in fall 2022, comparing it to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic and its disruptions.
“These results show that there are troubling gaps in the basic skills of these students,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the tests, The Post reported. The new data, she said, “reinforces the fact that recovery is going to take some time.”
The average math score is now the same as it was in 1990, while the average reading score is the same as it was in 2004.
Hardest hit were the lowest-performing students. In math, their scores showed declines of 12 to 14 points, while their highest-performing peers fell 6 points. The pattern for reading was similar, with low performers seeing twice the decline of higher ones.
Students from all parts of the country and of all races and ethnicities lost ground in math. Reading was more varied. Scores dropped for Black, multiracial and white students. But Hispanic, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native students were described as “not measurably different.”
Most of those tested were 10 years old, in fourth or fifth grade, at the onset of the pandemic. They were in seventh or eighth grade as they took the tests.
“This is more than alarming,” said Carey Wright, former state superintendent of education in Mississippi and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the tests. “Thirteen-year-olds are in high schools, and their futures depend on being able to recover from this.”
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