With the post-pandemic return to in-person education, the hope and hype around making up for lost learning during the pandemic called for doubling down on reading and math fundamentals.

To the disappointment of the education community, the most recent data available—scores from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an assessment of 4th and 8th grade students—indicate an alarming continuation of learning loss, especially in reading.

According to an article in The New York Times, “The percentage of eighth graders who have ‘below basic’ reading skills was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history—33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at ‘below basic’ was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.”

In math the data painted a less dire picture: Scores for higher achieving 4th graders were similar to scores for 4th graders in 2019. But lower performing math students have not made up for lost ground. 

With widespread adoption of the “Science of Reading”, a program that emphasizes teaching foundational literacy skills, it was anticipated that the latest scores would reflect the benefits of this approach. In contrast, The Times writes:

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students pre-pandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

Contributing Factors

Some experts are looking beyond what’s happening in the classroom to explain this unexpected outcome, pointing to the fact that reading scores were declining even before pandemic school closings.

Nat Milkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute notes that the declines in school children scores mirror declines in adult scores over the same period. Milkus theorizes that factors such as screen time, cellphones, and social media are displacing reading.

Regardless of the reason, Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center of Education Statistics, sums up the grim scores this way: “Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels. We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”