Ray Domanico The Nation’s Report Card Should Trigger Alarm Bells Decades of federal, state, and local reforms have largely failed to yield improvements in student achievement.
The newly released 2024 results of the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), contain sobering implications for education policy at the national, state, and local levels. Many have pointed out that the scores appear largely unchanged from two years ago, indicating that neither the nation nor New York City and State have bounced back from the learning loss attributed to pandemic-era school closures. That’s true, but long-term trends suggest that average score improvements had already stalled by the mid-2010s, well before Covid-related disruptions. Current scores, in fact, barely differ from those seen at the turn of the century.
National reading scores in grades four and eight are concerning. The 2024 scores from public schools match levels last seen in the 1990s, before the onset of the “school reform era” (2001 to 2017) of the Bush and Obama administrations, which pursued aggressive federal efforts to improve education. Per NAEP, “In 2024 the average reading score for the nation at grade 4 was 2 points lower compared to 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” The report card concludes, “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score in 2024 was not significantly different.”
Eighth-grade scores followed the same trend: “In 2024, the average reading score for the nation at grade 8 was 2 points lower than 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” And again: “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was not significantly different in 2024.”
These numbers should trigger alarm bells. First, they confirm that the Covid-era school closures have had an enormous effect on students who in 2020 were in elementary school—the years they should have been learning to read. They also demonstrate that the billions of federal dollars given to school districts in the years since have done little to mitigate the damage.
More broadly, these results highlight the limited effectiveness of federal efforts to improve achievement in the nation’s schools. The Trump administration would do well to remind the public of this reality as it attempts to shutter the Department of Education and push authority back to the states.
After more than 20 years of reforms by both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations and by aligned “experts,” we don’t have much to show in the way of sustained improvement. At the peak of the national effort, during the late years of the Obama administration, parents across the country voiced their disapproval of what were then called the Common Core standards. They distrusted anything coming from Washington, whatever its theoretical merits. That distrust has not abated, and the current NAEP results validate it. Potential federal retrenchment in favor of state control should be on the negotiating table.
Closer to home, the results for New York City and State underscore what we have known for years: both the city and state get middling results despite record-level spending on schools. New York has the highest per-pupil spending of any state, but its fourth-graders scored at about the national average. They showed no change from 1992 and are at the same level as in 1998. The same was true for the state’s eighth-graders. New York City’s fourth-graders also showed no improvement in reading and perform at the same level as fourth-graders in 2002, when the city first participated in NAEP. Again, the same is true for eighth-graders.
New York City and State voters concerned about education will have strong reason to question the political status quo in this year’s mayoral election and next year’s statewide elections. The New York way—spending more with no effect on student achievement—is not working. But the political problem runs deeper than the governor or mayor. Those offices are important, but the one-party-dominated state legislature holds a lot of the cards. They are the ones who demand more spending, no matter what enrollment declines occur. They limit the establishment of more charter schools in the city and refuse to consider any meaningful support for families who seek religious or private schools for their children. They also tie the mayor’s hands in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily capping class sizes in the city.
Electing a mayor willing to acknowledge the success of the city’s public and charter schools in the 2000s and early 2010s would be a good start. But when they cast their ballots, voters should also keep in mind the worst intentions of the city council, substantiated by the state legislature.
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