Washington — Math and reading scores for America’s 9-year-olds declined drastically over the first two years of the pandemic, according to a new federal research — affording an early view of the sheer magnitude of the learning losses delivered to the nation’s children.
Reading scores suffered their largest decline in 30 years, while math scores had their first decrease in the history of the testing regimen underpinning the study, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a component of the U.S. Education Department.
The decreases touched all parts of the country and harmed kids of most races. But pupils of color suffered some of the greatest drops, expanding the racial success gap.
Much of the nation’s standardized testing didn’t place during the early days of the pandemic, so the data presented Thursday gave an early glimpse at the impact of pandemic learning disruptions. Broader data is likely to be released later this year as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, popularly known as the Nation’s Report Card.
“These are some of the greatest losses we have witnessed in a single assessment cycle in 50 years of the NAEP program,” said Daniel McGrath, the interim assistant commissioner of NCES. “Students in 2022 are performing at a level previously seen two decades ago.”
The report reflects two years of disruption in American education as schools shut down for months at a time amid COVID-19 breakouts. Many pupils spent a year or more learning from home, and virus outbreaks among staff and students prolonged the disruption even after youngsters returned to the classroom.
In math, the average score for 9-year-old kids declined 7 percentage points between 2020 and 2022, according to the report. The average reading score declined 5 points.
The pandemic’s turmoil notably harmed students of color. Math results declined by 5 percentage points for white kids, compared with 13 points for Black students and 8 points for Hispanic students. During the epidemic, the gap between Black and white kids grew by 8 percentage points.
In reading, the decreases were more uniform: white, black, and Hispanic kids all saw their scores fall by 6 points.
The study indicated that Asian American kids, Native American pupils, and students of two or more ethnicities did not significantly improve in reading or mathematics between 2020 and 2022.
Geographically, all regions had drops in math, but the declines in the Northeast and Midwest were slightly greater than those in the West and South. The outcomes for reading were comparable, with the exception of the West, which had no discernible difference compared to 2020.
Despite a significant decline after 2020, the average reading score was 7 points better in 1971 than it was in 1978, and the average math score was 15 points higher.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the NCES, described the results as a “sobering” depiction of education during the pandemic.
According to federal officials, this is the first nationally representative research comparing student accomplishment before and after the epidemic, when the majority of students had returned to in-person education in 2022. Early in 2020, shortly before the World Health Organization proclaimed COVID-19 a pandemic, and early in 2022, testing was finished.
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