Thoughts on the massive drop in US middle schoolers' reading and math test scores

 It's been underway for many years, but there's been a recent acceleration of the trend:

American students' test scores in math and reading got significantly worse last year — continuing a decade-long freefall.

Driving the news: The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data.

Details: The findings come from a test known as "The Nation's Report Card" — a continuous, national assessment of 13-year-old students. Results were distributed by the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department.

By the numbers: Math and reading scores began declining in 2012, and average scores are now lower than they were before the pandemic.

• The average math score for 13 year olds declined 9 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
• The average reading score for 13 year olds declined 4 points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years.
• About 8,700 students took the assessments at about 460 schools across the country.

The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began.

• Scores declined among all racial and ethnic groups, and among both male and female students, and across urban, suburban and rural areas.

Enrollment in algebra dropped from 34% of 13 year olds in 2012 to 24% in 2023.

• And fewer students said they frequently read for fun, which is associated with higher achievement.

What they're saying: Post-pandemic academic recovery should be addressed holistically, including students' mental health, basic skills and teacher absenteeism, said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner for assessment for the National Center for Education Statistics.

• "Students' basic skills were disrupted in a way that we would not have thought before," Carr said. "These data are clear on that point." 

What we're watching: Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994. 

• Reading and math scores of elementary school students also plummeted, demonstrating the far-reaching effects of education changes during the pandemic.
• "The educational opportunities we give today's students are crucial for their individual and collective success," said Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board. "Leaders from federal, state and community levels must act with urgency and prepare students to pursue their educational, career and life goals."

It is accurate to ascribe much of this to "education changes during the pandemic." 

When pretty much everything, certainly including schools, was shut down in March 2020, I was rather vocal about extending grace to those implementing this policy. The virus was an unprecedented phenomenon, and we, as a society, were feeling our way through. I thought at the time that the last thing we needed was one more battlefield on which to further rub raw our already polarized environment. 

But we started learning about what was and was not a public-health threat. One thing we learned is that schools could have opened, certainly by that fall. But vested interests had another agenda: 

The fault for this educational disaster must also be pinned on our public-health bureaucracy, which constantly exaggerated the danger of Covid-19 to children, and the danger of spread at schools, while underplaying the adverse public-health outcomes of school closures. Particularly galling was the CDC’s taking the non-scientific advice of teachers’ unions while developing guidance on school reopening. America was a strange global outlier in masking children, restricting their movement and play, and shutting down their schooling. The baleful results are only just now being tallied.

Parents and children are owed not just an apology but a strict public accounting of what went wrong and why.

But let's be honest here. This was just the latest manifestation of the cultural rot that has been underway since the tectonic shift of the 1960s.  

The whole reason for the current classical-education movement is that public schools lost sight of what education ought to be for. About the time of the Great Upheaval, the John Dewey vision of what education was about irreversibly predominated. It simultaneously pursued two tracks: preparing students for the work force / job market, and encouraging them to preoccupy themselves with that which was "relevant" at the expense of a grounding of the best that the best minds of Western civilization had contributed to human existence. I saw it firsthand. By 1968, when I was in seventh grade, we were having class-time discussions about rock lyrics.

 As the decades progressed, the educational apparatus focused more and more on social issues. I remember a substitute teaching stint in the 1980s in which a lesson for the day during the health segment had to do with coping strategies for living in a blended family. I thought, in my day, health class was about matters such as here's-where-your-pancreas-is-located. 

As an academic historian, I'm particularly alarmed and saddened by history scores dropping to their lowest level ever. I guess it's to be expected. What kid wants to be guilt-tripped about race and capitalism day after day? 

So let's be sure we don't treat this as an isolated phenomenon. No amount of tweaking of our present approach is going to rectify this plummet. 

There is no level on which our civilization is not in deep trouble.