American students are performing poorly in reading and math skills, failing to regain lost ground during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered to fourth graders and eighth graders.
“The most notable challenges evident in the 2024 data are in reading comprehension. Reading scores dropped in both fourth and eighth grades since 2022, continuing declines first reported in 2019, before the pandemic,” said a Jan. 29 statement from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the tests.
As for math scores, fourth grade students registered a two-point gain from 2022. However, this fails to plug the five-point decline in math scores from 2019 to 2022. Eighth grade scores “showed no significant change.”…