"At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there's another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards."
"Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is "below basic"-meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea."
The past decade has seen a sharp reversal in U.S. student achievement after steady early-century gains. Progress stalled around 2013 and then backslid well before the COVID pandemic, so pandemic disruption alone cannot explain the losses. NAEP results show 33 percent of eighth graders and 40 percent of fourth graders read below basic. The 2024 ACT average of 19.4 is the lowest since the test's 1990 redesign. Learning losses are concentrated among lower-performing students while the top tenth remain largely unchanged. Contributing factors include smartphones and social media and a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.
Read at The Atlantic
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