How are Students Doing?
One of the best metrics to determine how students are progressing towards fundamental levels of academic proficiency in reading and math is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment. Based on the NAEP’s 2024 results, the answer to the question of “How are students doing?” is a resounding “not well.”
Most alarmingly, national Reading and Math scores are below pre-pandemic levels in all tested grades and subjects. Higher-performing students have largely driven any post-pandemic progress made in recent years. In contrast, the gap between higher-performing and lower-performing students continues to widen, a trend observed for over a decade.
To illustrate the impact of this gap, consider that on a 500-point scale, the lowest-performing students are generally scoring about 100 points below the highest-performing students. This trend alone has profound implications for teachers, leaders, and families for how they support and guide students towards college and career success.
Reading Results
As colleges and universities continue to report that students are less prepared for college-level coursework, it’s essential to examine the trends existing in younger grades to find solutions as communities and as a nation.
According to NAEP national benchmarks, only 31 percent of students in 4th grade and 30 percent of students in 8th grade are reading proficiently, the lowest percentage ever documented. These results are a 2% and 1% drop respectively from 2022, despite all of the efforts to combat learning loss from the pandemic. No state saw reading gains in either grade, compared to 2022. Scores in reading have dropped 10 points since 2019.
What do those data mean with respect to specific reading skills? Less than 1 in 3 4th graders can provide an opinion using relevant information from a text. Less than 1 out of 3 students in 8th grade can identify basic literary elements in a text, like the main idea, order of events, or character traits.
These data are critically important as numerous studies have identified a strong connection between reading at grade level by third grade and students’ future success.
“When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that when a student fails to meet this bar, they are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”– Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark education. |
Math Results
The math results were a bit mixed, with 4th-grade students improving nationally by 2 points to 40% math proficiency in 2024; however, this increase was primarily due to improvements in middle and high-performing students, while lower-performing students remained stagnant.
In 8th grade, math scores remained the same as in 2022, with 28% math proficiency. This proficiency rate is alarming because it means the historic 8-point drop in 8th-grade math scores between 2019 and 2022 has not yet seen a rebound, and students continue to perform at this lower level post-pandemic.
67% of our nation’s 4th and 8th grade students remain below the basic proficiency threshold in mathematics. That number is complicated by the gains of higher-performing students in 2024 and the declines of lower-performing students.
What do these data mean with respect to specific math skills? 60% of 4th graders struggle to add and subtract multi-digit whole numbers, and 72% of 8th graders cannot understand concepts of parallel and perpendicular lines, nor can they calculate a greatest common factor or a least common multiple.
Why Do These Data Matter?
The outcomes that we desire for our students to be college and career ready when they reach adulthood are the culmination of years of efforts by students, families, and educators to prepare each student. If students are not making adequate progress at key milestones, it applies even more pressure on the system at upper grades to do even more to achieve the same outcomes.
More alarming is the fact that traditionally lower-performing students, including English language learners, Black and Hispanic students, low-income students, and students with disabilities, all experienced notable declines. School leaders must use these data to guide accessibility, educational strategies, and instructional decisions at all levels. The stakes are too high not to.
How to Respond
To combat these trends, schools must focus on improving student attendance, increasing student motivation, and using research-based instructional practices at scale. Student attendance has been a top concern for educators since the pandemic, especially for chronically absent students (10 or more absences). Increasing learning time is key to improving motivation and achievement, and schools must partner with families to tackle this issue. In all cases, we as educators must work hard to invest in and engage our students as much as possible. Our efforts to make learning fun and achievement possible will lead to long-term improvements for students at all grade levels.
What is NAEP?The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or The Nation’s Report Card, is a nationwide assessment that evaluates student performance in the US. It offers a detailed overview of student academic achievement and learning experiences across different subjects, providing valuable insights to shape education policy and practice. NAEP delivers a trustworthy and unbiased measure of the country’s educational progress by testing a representative sample of students from each state and subgroup. |
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