Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics

u1hcw9nx

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments to 13-year-old students from October to December of the 2022–23 school year. The average scores for 13-year-olds declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in mathematics compared to the previous assessment administered during the 2019–20 school year. Compared to a decade ago, the average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.

magicalist

(2023) comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022

biscuits1

I grepped for "covid" and "COVID-19" on all presented text. 1 result found. ". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?" Can someone else confirm? Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious. Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.

bijowo1676

screen time and social media

godelski

The peak was in 2012 2012 2020 2023 Reading 263 260 256 Math 285 280 271 So people are looking at Covid and that's probably not enough. The scores are closer to those of the 80's than those in the 90's and 00's

tdb7893

I cannot wait for one of my uncles to post this about how kids these days can't do anything so I can point out that the scores were even lower in his age bracket.

swingboy

The right wingers are going to have a heyday with this one just like they’ve been doing with the “Swedes are getting dumber and nobody knows why” articles.

aggakake

Look at Youtube Shorts in an incognito window to see the mindless crap that's popular among median users.

japhyr

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning. I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.

raincole

I know the knee-jerk reaction is social media, but from the graph in the article, it seems to just get back to the same level as 90s.

NickNaraghi

Note that these are 2023 numbers, not 2025.

crabbone

Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer. The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer. I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce. I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.

dzink

Tiktok was launched by ByteDance in 2018. Reels was unleashed 2020 and YouTube shorts in 2021.

tmsh

It looks like it's trending back up post-COVID (this link has California data but not sure how you link to this without selecting a state)? https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile/over...

nonameiguess

Everyone is going to name their pet bugaboo, but if you look at the full charts, the scores were pretty stable in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and are regressing back down to what they were historically. The real question is why they went up temporarily until 2012.

darkteflon

… in mice. Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.

ekjhgkejhgk

Does anybody else find it super suspicious that all the percentiles declined by similar amounts?

anonreeeeplor

Without documenting the Change in demographics it’s meaningless. If there are more dumber people from populations with lower Iq - then this is inevitable. It’s an IQ test not a test of teaching skill.

PaulKeeble

[1] is a summary of the impact on the brain of Covid-19 infections including IQ reduction but many others besides. Its best understood that there is no such thing as a consequence free Covid infection, it always damages something and the early british experiment where they intentionally infected young men resulted in all of them loosing IQ and none of them being aware of the loss. This finding has been built on substantially in the past 6 years and we have a much large list of issues now, none of it treatable. [1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...

havaloc

Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially. Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all. Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year. As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.