COVID Worsened Long Decline in 12th-Graders’ Reading, Math Skills
First NAEP data since pandemic show seniors who graduated in 2024 performed worse than those who graduated in 2019.
;)
Education news and commentary, delivered right to your inbox.
Sign up for The 74 newsletter.
The Class of 2024, which entered high school just months after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, spent nearly four years enduring lockdowns, masks, distance learning and increased absenteeism — and it shows: By last year, they were reading and doing math worse than any senior class of the past generation.
In the first nationwide indicator of how older students have fared since the pandemic, the news is bad, but not surprising: COVID took a bite out of already declining basic skills.
Between 2019 and 2024, scores in both math and reading sank three percentage points, a statistically significant drop, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP tests, often called “the Nation’s Report Card.”
Tested in the spring of 2024, just 22% of seniors were “proficient” or above in math, down from 24% in 2019. And just 35% were proficient in reading, down from 37% in 2019. Higher percentages in 2024 also scored in NAEP’s “below basic” level in both subjects.
The results, released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department, are “sobering,” said Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the . He noted “significant declines in achievement” among the lowest-performing students going back even before the pandemic. In one particularly grim indicator, a larger percentage of the Class of 2024 scored in the tests’ “below basic” level in both math and reading than in any previous assessment dating back decades.
Among other findings:
- In math, 45% of students scored below basic, compared to 40% in 2019 and 35% in 2013;
- In reading, 32% of students were below basic, up from 30% in 2019 and 28% in 2015;
- 45% reported a “low level of interest and enjoyment” in reading, a slight improvement from 49% in 2019;
- Just 35% met NCES’s standard for being academically prepared for college, down from 37% in 2019.
Of special concern: female students, who typically outperform their male peers in reading, saw worse results than in 2019, while male students’ reading across all achievement levels were basically flat.
The reading decline among female students aligns with previous findings about the severe toll that both the pandemic and social media have taken on adolescent girls. One found that teen girls were struggling the most relative to other groups when it comes to anxiety and depression, as well as the physical manifestations of these problems, such as headaches and stomach aches.
Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the and an author on the study, noted that the poor results “are coming at a terrible time, when there is zero federal effort to improve education through policy and indeed the federal government is withholding education dollars over tired culture war battles.”
‘We have not recovered from COVID’
Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research said the new results are particularly troublesome in light of the federal government’s $190 billion COVID investment in schools. Given that effort, he said, the five years between 2019 and 2024 should have brought “both sharp drops and recovery” as students lived through the pandemic and schools benefited from unprecedented investment. But except in limited cases, scores never improved.
“These results, to me, are just more confirmation that we have not recovered from COVID,” Goldhaber said. “And my guess is that some of why we haven’t recovered is because of the trends in achievement that we saw in the decade prior to the pandemic.”
These results, to me, are just more confirmation that we have not recovered from COVID.
Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research
Tom Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education agreed: “Something fundamental in U.S. schools is broken and we need to fix it,” he said.
Kane theorized that among top candidates for the malaise are: absenteeism rates that have yet to return to pre-pandemic norms; reduced school system commitments to test-driven accountability, and the effects of social media.
Something fundamental in U.S. schools is broken.
Tom Kane, Harvard University
In 2024, 31% of 12th-graders who took the tests reported missing three or more days of school in the prior month, compared to 26% who took the math tests in 2019 and 25% who took reading tests. Kane noted that has found students who miss school make instruction less effective for others when they return because they’re spending teachers’ time getting themselves caught up on what they missed.
Former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the past several administrations have squandered the power of the federal government when it comes to education policy, weakening its ability to push improvements.
“When you take your foot off the gas and stop using federal leadership, federal imperative around these performance issues, it shows up,” she said in an interview. Spellings, who now leads the , a Washington, D.C., think tank that encourages civil political discourse between parties, noted that the Every Student Succeeds Act, implemented by President Obama, was “less muscular” than No Child Left Behind, enacted under President George W. Bush and overseen by Spellings. “We know how to use the federal role in smarter ways to the benefit of kids, and we stopped doing it.”
‘Truly a five-alarm fire’
The latest NAEP tests were administered from January through March 2024, to a sampling of students in 1,500 schools nationwide, with 24,300 seniors sitting for reading tests and 19,300 for math. The tests last about an hour and are administered on laptops or tablet computers. They carry no stakes for students, who are, in some cases, just weeks from graduation. As a result, researchers have found that far fewer 12th-graders perceive that they must do well on the tests — a found that 86% of fourth-graders said it’s important, while just 35% of 12th-graders said the same.
When you take your foot off the gas and stop using federal leadership, federal imperative around these performance issues, it shows up.
Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education
But Kane and others said that may be a negligible factor in the poor results, since scores are as low, in many cases, as they’ve ever been. “That can’t be explained by kids just not thinking the test matters,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.
Low stakes notwithstanding, USC’s Polikoff said the results are unsurprising and “no less disappointing” on that account. Seniors’ poor performance, he said, closely matches recent trends from earlier grades and has been on the decline .
Of special concern, he and others said, are the achievement declines of the lowest performing students in both math and reading — especially the unprecedented rise in students performing below basic. “That our lowest achieving students are falling so far behind is truly a five-alarm fire,” he said.
That our lowest achieving students are falling so far behind is truly a five-alarm fire.
Morgan Polikoff, University of Southern California
AIR’s Goldhaber pointed out that much of the overall decline in 12th-grade scores can be attributed to sharp drops by this group. “One of the reasons that the average NAEP tests are coming down,” he said, “is because the bottom is just falling out of the distribution.”
While researchers are just beginning to get their arms around why skills are suffering at the moment, Polikoff agreed that the rise of and social media are at play, as well as declines in and “the current toxic political moment that high schoolers are probably sensitive to and that distracts from real efforts to improve schools.”
Harvard’s Kane said he’s eager to see results from research related to the recent proliferation of school mobile phone bans, but worried that, given the slow pace of academic research, the findings won’t come fast enough to make a difference. “I’m just worried that left to our own, without a concerted, coordinated effort, there’s going to be competing studies about the effect of cell phone bans and it’s going to get caught up in politics. We can’t wait for that. There needs to be a concerted effort to try to form a scientific consensus on what was the effect of the ban, in the next year or two.”
Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education and co-author of on teen disengagement, said COVID’s “ripple effects” are long-lasting, affecting many aspects of students’ lives. “If you have your first couple of years of high school where you really have very little learning happening, it’s not a surprise that you’re going to be performing much worse on your core competencies than other generations,” she said.
Kids who are from higher-income families get second chances when they disengage. Poor kids don't.
Rebecca Winthrop, Brookings Institution
Winthrop and a co-author found that teens are disengaging from school “across the board,” in both public and private schools, responding to what they perceive as poor-quality instruction, irrelevant pedagogy and unsupportive environments.
“But kids who are from higher-income families get second chances when they disengage,” Winthrop said. “Poor kids don’t.”
CRPE’s Lake said the disappointing results are “frustrating,” since she and others have been sounding the alarm for several years now “that if we don’t change course, things will be very bad — and things are very bad.”
The solutions, she said, will come from improving bedrock indicators — instruction and teacher quality, especially for struggling students, as well as ”accountability for adults in the system.”
“If there’s one thing that I’d say people should focus on, it’s the kids who are in free-fall decline,” Lake said. “It’s way more than most people think. Only the top 10% of kids are continuing to do well. All the others are declining. … We know what to do. We just need to figure out how to get it done.”
As grim as the results are, Harvard’s Kane said, they point to the ongoing importance of NAEP at a time when its future is less than certain. Just weeks after the second Trump administration took office, Department of Government Efficiency workers slashed Education Department personnel, firing NCES’s longtime director and reducing its headcount from about 100 employees to three.
But as many states loosen accountability requirements, he said, the federal testing role becomes more, not less, important. Without NAEP, he said, “we could have just coasted along” unaware of the bigger picture.
As the Trump administration works to reconfigure the Institute for Education Sciences, Kane said, “it ought to be a vehicle for answering these questions: ‘What was the effect of the cell phone bans? How do we lower absenteeism?’ And that could be done in partnership with states. But it requires a strategy. It’s not just going to happen. Somebody is going to have to decide that these are priorities and work with states to try to find the answers.”
74 Senior Writer Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.
Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and The 74 both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.
Did you use this article in your work?
We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.
