It’s no surprise that educational achievement suffered after two chaotic years of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s still distressing to see the desolate picture of students’ academics and ever-widening gap between low- and high-performing students revealed by the latest national proficiency test scores.
Math and reading scores declined among fourth- and eighth-grade students in most states, according to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released Sunday. Overall, the “Nation’s Report Card,” as this periodic report is known, showed such steep declines in test scores compared with previous years that education experts warn that we’re on the verge of losing an entire generation to substantial learning loss.
California students fared slightly better than students in most other states, with small declines in math but less significant changes in reading. However, California students are still underperforming compared with national standards. Most troublingly, low-performing students’ scores declined at much higher rates than higher-performing students. For example, the average score in 2022 for students at Los Angeles Unified schools who are eligible for the free lunch program was 35 points lower than students who didn’t qualify for that program. In 2002, that difference was only 14 points.
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