The latest report card has been released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just this month. This is a test administered to our nation's fourth and eighth graders every two years by an arm of the Department of Education. The testing was administered beginning in January 2024 and ended in March 2024.
Scores are rising for many students who already perform well, while those who struggle have stagnated or fallen further behind their peers. This trend, which began about a decade ago, is becoming even more evident.
In some instances, this divide was historic: Lower-performing fourth and eighth graders recorded the worst reading scores in over 30 years.
“The news is not good,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, informed reporters on Tuesday. “Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels.”
Scores experienced a significant decline in 2022 after students faced two disrupted pandemic school years characterized by closures, quarantines, and ill-prepared for remote learning. However, in 2024, reading scores dropped even further for both fourth and eighth graders.
“This is a major concern — a concern that can’t be blamed solely on the pandemic,” Carr stated. “Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading.”
Students who performed the worst on the NAEP test were more likely to be frequently absent from school, Carr also noted.
The results are sure to fuel ongoing debate about whether schools are doing enough to help struggling students. This includes the students that are farthest behind with reading challenges, how school closures during the pandemic created learning gaps, and whether schools effectively spent the nearly $190 billion they received in federal COVID relief dollars.
I feel more than ever that the reading gap needs to be addressed. Dyslexia takes up a portion, if not a large portion of that pie. Some school districts are implementing further training for a few teachers in the district as a stop-gap and are including further education at the college level. Dyslexia awareness has been slow to gain the importance it deserves.
These changes will take time to come to fruition. We keep up with our good work, ensuring that our next and upcoming generations will be brought up to speed in the reading, spelling and writing realms.
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