The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades, according to new federal testing data, a worrying sign for teenagers as they face an uncertain job market and an information landscape challenged by artificial intelligence.
In math, 12th graders had the lowest
performance since 2005.
The results, from the National Assessment
of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard
exam, showed that about a third of the 12th graders who were tested
last year did not have basic reading skills.
It was a sigh that, among other skills,
they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech. In math,
nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may
not have mastered such skills as using percentages to solve real-world problems.
The test scores are the first of their kind
to be released since the COVID-19 pandemic upended education.
They also arrive at a time when Americans
overall are abandoning printed text for screen time and video-dominated social
media, which experts have linked to declining academics.
The NAEP test results indicate “a stark
decline” in performance, said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the
National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the federal Education
Department that administers the test.
Test score drops were probably caused in
part by the disruption of the pandemic, including illness, school closures and
remote learning. The seniors included in the new federal data were in eighth
grade when the virus transformed daily life in March 2020. Millions of teenagers
spent a year or more learning online.
Even so, data from previous testing shows that
learning declines—especially among struggling students—began several years
before the pandemic. Experts have pointed to a wide range of possible explanations.
Over the last decade, both adults and
children began to replace reading time with screen time, social media and,
increasingly, streaming video. And over the same period, the federal government
and many states relaxed policies that were intended to hold schools and
teachers accountable for student learning.
The new test data also includes eighth
grade science scores. Performance in 2024 declined, with 38% of students
scoring below the basic level, compared with 33% in 2019.
(Dana Goldstein)
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