Test Scores Plunged During the Pandemic

Mark Schneider, Director of IES: 

Mounting evidence shows just how much damage the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures wreaked on our nation's students. The recently released results for NAEP's Long Term Trend (LTT) assessment for 9-year-old students adds depth to an already dismal picture.

LTT has been administered to 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students for decades. Focused on core skills, LTT in reading was first administered in 1971 and math in 1973, giving us a very long trend line. But for now, I am interested in a much shorter (2 year) time frame. NAEP administered LTT for 9-year-olds between January and March in 2020—the data collection ended within days of the nation's schools shutting down. LTT was administered again in January through March of 2022, making it a nationally representative sample of student performance right before the pandemic and (hopefully) at the end of the nation's misery.

What does LTT show?

To paraphrase an old saw and repeating my comments on other NAEP results: If there wasn't bad news, there would be no news at all. Between the pre-pandemic assessment in 2020 and the post-pandemic assessment in 2022, overall scores went down 7 points in math and 5 points in reading—an unprecedented decline. Tapping into LTT's extraordinarily long trend line, math scores this low were last seen in 1999 and reading scores this low in 2004. Decades of progress wiped out in 2 years.