https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/31/test-scores-take-another-dive-will-anyone-be-held-accountable/
Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.
Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”
Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.
Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.
Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.
“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”
“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.
“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.
This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”