The Nation's Report Card Delivers a Split Verdict That Demands a Civic Response

The just-released Nation’s Report Card presents two different stories. One carries measured good news. The other warns that time is running out to act. Together, they give an honest snapshot of where American education stands and what needs to happen to improve the life prospects of young people.

The test results come from the Long-Term Trend edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which has measured student achievement in reading and math since the early 1970s. Unlike the main NAEP, which tests 4th and 8th graders every two years, the long-term trend assessment samples 9- and 13-year-olds. Its format is largely unchanged, making it the closest thing the U.S. has to a consistent, decades-long academic record.

The story about 9-year-olds offers cautious grounds for hope. Average scores for this group rose 4 points since 2022, with reading essentially back to pre-COVID levels. More striking, the gains were driven primarily by the lowest-performing students, those at the 10th and 25th percentiles, who had fallen furthest during the pandemic.

In reading, 10th-percentile 9-year-olds gained 8 points since 2022, and in math, 9 points. This reverses the troubling pattern of the 2010s, when achievement gains went almost entirely to top-performing students. That these youngest students, who were still in preschool when COVID arrived and largely escaped its worst educational disruptions, are recovering at all, and that the recovery is reaching the children most in need, is an encouraging signal.

The story about 13-year-olds offers no such comfort. Average reading scores for this group are statistically no higher than they were in 1971, when the test began. Math scores are 15 points below their 2012 peak. In 2012, 85 percent of 13-year-old test takers could clear the 250-point math threshold, signaling the ability to handle basic word problems. Today, only 70 percent can.

These students were in second and third grade when the pandemic hit. They experienced years of school closures and disrupted instruction. They’re now in middle school and entering high school. As Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, stated plainly, “Schools won’t have them much longer.”

But it’s a mistake to treat 2020 as the beginning of this story. Researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford have documented a broader learning recession in American schools that began in 2013, when test scores peaked and began a slow, persistent decline before COVID. The pandemic hit the 13-year-old group with particular force. But they were already entering a system that was losing ground academically for a decade.

So two forces converged. There was a learning slide that predated the pandemic and a public health emergency that struck 13-year-olds at their most formative stage.

The report contains information on more than just test scores. For example, the student questionnaire asked how many days they were absent from school in the past month and how often they read for fun. The answers are troubling.

Absenteeism among 13-year-olds has worsened, with 61 percent now reporting being absent at least one day per month, compared to 44 percent in 2012. Absenteeism alone accounted for nearly half of the 3-point drop in 4th-grade reading between 2019 and 2022.

Reading for pleasure is in freefall. Only 14 percent of 13-year-olds and 37 percent of 9-year-olds say they read for fun almost every day, down from 35 percent and 53 percent respectively forty years ago.

Both rising absenteeism and the collapse in reading for pleasure point to problems that go beyond test scores and schools. They reflect habits and conditions that shape learning. Solutions require more than a classroom fix. They demand a broader civic response that includes families, libraries, other community institutions, and the rhythms of daily life.

Finally, this isn’t only an education story. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and colleagues have calculated that the past dozen years' achievement declines work out to lifetime income reductions comparable to an 8 percent income tax surcharge imposed on today’s students. These aren’t abstract projections. They translate into decreased wages, lower workforce productivity, and reduced economic mobility for students who most need the ladder to go up. For the 13-year-old cohort especially, recovering that lost ground is an urgent and closing window.

Here are six action items that K-12 education and civic leaders should undertake.

• Focus on 13-year-olds before the window closes. Targeted, intensive intervention in middle schools, including high-dosage tutoring, extended learning time, and structured reading and math programs, isn’t optional at this stage. This cohort is running out of K-12 years. Their learning losses are likely permanent unless schools become measurably better than they were before the pandemic.
• Treat absenteeism as the crisis it is. With nearly two-thirds of 13-year-olds absent at least one day per month, attendance is an emergency in its own right. Recovery can’t happen in an empty seat.
• Rebuild a culture of reading that recognizes it as the foundation for everything else. Schools, libraries, families, and communities need to act together to get books back into children’s hands and reduce the screen time that has displaced independent reading. Reading proficiency isn’t only a literacy goal. It’s the foundation on which math reasoning, scientific thinking, and every other form of academic work rests. This is a cultural project as much as a curricular one.
• Treat math decline as a pathways problem, not just a classroom problem. Math scores for 13-year-olds are 15 points below their 2012 peak, a mobility signal as much as an academic one. A student who loses mathematical confidence by middle school may be quietly losing access to the pathways that follow: apprenticeships, technical training, health care, coding, and data work.
• Study what’s working for 9-year-olds and scale it. The gains among the youngest, lowest-performing students represent a real reversal of recent trends. Identifying which instructional approaches and school conditions produced those gains, and moving them from boutique to baseline, is an immediate research and policy priority.
• Protect the long-term data. The Long-Term Trend assessment has tracked American student achievement for more than fifty years. There are questions at the federal level about the future of some of these NAEP assessments. Eliminating this data tool doesn’t make the learning problems go away. It only removes our ability to see them clearly and act on them over time. If this work is to be the civic project it needs to be, the country needs a reliable, consistent yardstick.

The NAEP split verdict is more than an education report card. It’s also an economic and civic document. Improving outcomes for the students who’ve fallen furthest behind isn’t a narrow school reform project. It’s a community obligation, a workforce necessity, and a test of whether the country can make good on the promise that where a child starts doesn’t determine where they end up. That kind of recovery is, at its core, a civic project.