Decline in K-12 National Reading, Math, Science Scores Probed By US Senate Panel (newhampshirebulletin.com) 143
Just days after federal data revealed average reading, math and science scores dropped among certain grades since before the coronavirus pandemic, a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday picked apart the root causes and methods for students' academic improvement. From a report: The hearing in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions centered on the "state of K-12 education" -- which GOP members on the committee described as "troubling" -- in light of recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
NAEP, regarded as the gold standard for tracking students' academic performance, showed that average science scores for eighth-graders decreased by 4 points since before the pandemic, in 2019. Average math and reading scores for 12th-graders also fell 3 points between 2019 and 2024. The assessments were administered between January and March of 2024. Results also showed that just one-third of 12th-graders are considered academically prepared for college in math -- a drop from 37% in 2019.
The committee's chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy, said "it should concern us that children's reading, math and science scores have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels." The Louisiana Republican added that "success in education is not determined by how much we spend, but by who makes the decision and how wisely resources are directed," and "when states and local communities are empowered to tailor solutions to meet the unique needs of students, innovation follows." On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the panel, said that "while we focus on education -- as important as that is -- we also have to focus on the conditions under which our children are living."
NAEP, regarded as the gold standard for tracking students' academic performance, showed that average science scores for eighth-graders decreased by 4 points since before the pandemic, in 2019. Average math and reading scores for 12th-graders also fell 3 points between 2019 and 2024. The assessments were administered between January and March of 2024. Results also showed that just one-third of 12th-graders are considered academically prepared for college in math -- a drop from 37% in 2019.
The committee's chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy, said "it should concern us that children's reading, math and science scores have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels." The Louisiana Republican added that "success in education is not determined by how much we spend, but by who makes the decision and how wisely resources are directed," and "when states and local communities are empowered to tailor solutions to meet the unique needs of students, innovation follows." On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the panel, said that "while we focus on education -- as important as that is -- we also have to focus on the conditions under which our children are living."
Shows in ACT Scores (Score:2)
ACT scores show a striking decline starting before the pandemic.
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Early 2017 (Score:3)
ACT Test Scores For US Students Drop To a 30-Year Low [slashdot.org]
Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That pegs the beginning of the decline to 2017 (probably in the spring), before most of his first four years.
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Early scores show 3rd grade boys well below girls (Score:3)
The real missing part of these news stories is how they bury the learning gap that boys at early grades, the most important ones, are well behind girls in reading and language. Conveniently, that is used to not have special reading, vocabulary and literacy programs for young boys in general and, in particular, for boys from single parent and/or minority households.
California data for 8 year old Grade 3 boys and girls
ELA - English Language Arts for grade 3 - 8 year olds
Level - girls - boys - (girls - boys)
Hello Captain Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Step #1: Pay teachers so little that you have to subsidize corporate housing to attract them to your school.
Step #2: Incentivize teachers to use personal funds to equip their students.
Step #3: Remove parental accountability from student behavior.
Step #4: Drive away teachers with a passion for teaching with administrative challenges and not supporting them in student/parent issues.
Step#5: Be left with those willing to stick it out until retirement OR those who can't get a real job OR those insanely crazy few who's passion keeps them there.
Step#6: Standardize Testing, Teach the Test, Ignore Critical Thinking skills.
Step #7: Accept resulting failure in results, give up, and start teaching critical race theory and transgender acceptance in math classes.
Step #8: ????
Step #9: Profit.
Re: Hello Captain Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Let middle class students use vouchers for private school depriving public schools of funds. Then say they underperform.
Square this circle: (Score:1, Informative)
1 - Teachers make above the median wage in virtually every state, with far better benefits than the median.
2 - California spends twice as much per student than Florida, but is around twenty notches lower in the DOE NAEP national rankings.
3 - NYC’s lead charters cost less per student and accept the same exact demographic as its public schools, but are yielding far better results. The6 are incredibly popular among local minorities, and are only significantly opposed by white democrats and teachers union
Re: Square this circle: (Score:2)
I teach adjunct classes. 2 of them a week. 3 hours a class. I make $500 every 2 week. After grading, planning, etc I make $6.25 an hour. In only do it because surprise! The community college canâ(TM)t hire a full time teacher and I can afford to waste the time. Those kids are not getting a high quality education.
Re: Square this circle: (Score:2)
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California's education is extremely top heavy. Two of my son's teachers became "assistant superintendents" . They also build many "Taj Mahal" offices of education throughout the state.
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Politicize the education curriculum to the point where it disgusts teachers trying to do their jobs.
None of that will help much... (Score:3)
The underpaid teachers thing is a foul myth (Score:3)
First, those teachers are, in may places paid quite well when you consider their annual pay and benefits compared to other people of the same educational level and then take into account that they work a LOT fewer days per year. industrial employees in this country, for example, do NOT take months off every year.
Second, and it's a BIGGIE, is that most teachers in the US are government employees, and their unions have negotiated INSANE payouts that most Americans are completely unaware of. The typical teache
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This is certainly not the case in New York State. The pension my 85-year-old mom gets is an order of magnitude less than her at-retirement salary (at 55), which was still less than my starting salary at my first comp sci gig (which was 6 years before she retired). When I lived in California, the “running joke” with some teacher friends of mine was that you’d get a pink slip at the end of the school year and find out if you still had a job a few weeks before the next school year started.
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#1 Teacher pay, outside a rock bottom amount seen almost entirely in rural areas, has no significant effect on student performance
#2 This is a problem, perhaps if admin overhead hadn't ballooned far beyond teacher pay or student allotment it might not be an issue
#3 Irrelevant. They need to reinstitute student accountability. Disruption of class gets ISS and then suspension. Violence gets suspension. Continued violence gets expulsion. If you can't read, write, or do your sums at grade level, you get held bac
Houshold type and academic achievement (Score:1)
Even in the worst performing school districts, children from two parent households or father led single parent households have much higher academic achievement levels than single parent mother led households.
Teacher pay is in the middle and a much lesser issue with student academic achievement.
Policies that give incentives for families to be split, mothers to primarily receive the children, and a plethora of government subsidies giving incentives for that (man in the house rule, Title IV) are not helping.
Do
The call is coming from within the house (Score:5, Insightful)
When my kid was in high school there was 45 kids to a class and the last 10 had the stand during the class. Several schools have been closed due to funding.
The Republican party actively sabotages public education to fool you into privatizing it so that they can profit from it.
They think you're stupid. Are you? Don't answer me. It's the Republican party you need to answer come to midterms.
Re:The call is coming from within the house (Score:5, Insightful)
Sixty-two percent of my property taxes in California go toward education. They still want parents to supply classroom materials. Add to that, our lottery system funds education. It's corrupt.
That's because all local school funding (Score:2)
The other 38% of your funding comes from state level and federal money. That money is there very specifically to try to correct what's wrong with using property taxes to fund schools.
As an added bonus it maintains the suburbs that do not have a large enough tax base to fund their schools.
I am guessing though th
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Total garbage (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a chart from 2010 to 2021 [ed.gov] (a bit down the page) which will suit this argument well. You can find others going back to the seventies if you like and it will not help your assertion a bit. I'm using the short table for ease. Surely we can all agree (for the current purposes) with the left that Trump, the Bad Orange Man(TM) is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER and thus his era would have the most draconian cuts those evil Republican scum ever implemented, right? Well LOOK AT THE TABLE. Gaze upon the massive re
You're not American are you? (Score:2)
You're right we don't each get our own truth. The reality is that this is been going on for decades.
Donald Trump is the culmination of 50 years of right wing extremism and a slow descent into fascism and dictatorship.
It's like boiling a frog only t
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So the funny thing about that (Score:2)
In general democrat-run states have better schools. There is however several factors that make it tough for them to be perfect. For one thing there is still a little bit of the old nastiness involved in funding schools through property taxes. And is a little bit of the old white flight and other bits of nastiness.
Now the Democrats could fix a lot of that but they don't generally get supermajorities they get sm
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They think you're stupid. Are you? Don't answer me.
*Looks awkwardly at the title of this story*
Data disagrees (Score:2)
School spending per capita has been increasing year over year for decades when adjusted for inflation.
Figure 2 from here - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/c... [ed.gov]
In inflation adjusted dollars, there has been a 12.6% increase in per student spending in the USA over a 10 year period.
2010 spending per student $14,453
2021 spending per student $16,280
I suspect that much of this myth is that the 1960s space race and focus on education by the federal government and the post-man on the moon landing de-emphasis of "educat
Yes your rigth and it's all because of the (Score:1)
Because of the Donald. His crazy tariff policies have already precipitated the whole world into the abyss.
Trump's goal here along with the tariffs is to create a national sales tax so that he can eliminate his tax burden and the tax burden of his buddies. As a percentage is still much much much less than you pay but because they have about 60% of all the money in America it's still a pretty big number and they wanted for themselves.
Because he's just too fucking incompetent. He wouldn't have known how to gat
"We have concluded- (Score:2)
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-that we can do nothing and it's someone else's fault anyway." - US Congress
Yes, it is our fault for (re)electing this congress despite their poor job performance.
Study California, Florida, and Louisiana (Score:5, Insightful)
California has been at the forefront of adopting modern pedological science for the last twenty years. But there’s a puzzle: its DOE NAEP test score national rank concurrently fell to the middle of the pack. Is it possible that “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and other lead pedagogy books are a garden path? Perhaps their recommendations are reducing disparity between group identities - their top goal - but lowering overall outcome? Here’s a sample of the recommendations in question:
Mainstreaming: Place students with widely varying learning levels in the same class.
Seattle Math: This type of curriculum goes by many names. The goal is to limit expectations of mathematically correct answers, and limit rote learning of concepts like “times tables”, in favor of rewarding effort and narrative.
Whole Word Learning: Replace “phonics” - aka sounding out words according to their spelling - with rote recognition of the meaning of whole written words.
Hire based on identity: Increase the priority of group identity when judging suitability for hiring.
Drop advanced classes: Advanced classes measurably increase disparity, so simply eliminate them.
Teaching college equity: Lower standardized test based admissions requirements for teaching colleges, as these have been shown to decrease admissions of historically underrepresented groups. The corresponding SAT scores of admitted applicants have now been lowered below the median - to the 42nd percentile according to some estimates.
Restorative justice: Ensure punishment for infractions is equally apportioned according to holistic categories. This avoids disparities caused by punishment that’s made proportional to the infractions themselves.
Diversity statements: Ensure prospective new hires submit diversity statements that show an acceptance and understanding of the above ideas.
In the meantime Florida, which has foregone the above approaches, ranks around the top 5 in K-12 per the NAEP rankings, and number 1 per U.S. News.
Even more impressively, Louisiana’s 4th grade reading scores have risen dramatically from 47th place to 16th after eliminating mainstreaming (for example it holds back 3rd grade students that are having trouble), assigning the best teachers to classes with the most struggling readers, and reintroducing phonics. Louisiana’s other scores are rising too - all attributed to similar “back to basics” efforts.
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Keep in mind California spends DOUBLE per student in comparison to Florida.
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Yes, but can you tell me about White Genocide In South Africa?
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That has little to do with K-12 education unless perhaps you’re snarking about educational focus. It isn’t “racist” to discuss South Africa or any other nation.
Overall, critical thinking is FAR more important than critical theory, as the former is required to properly understand the latter.
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I was more saying that your post looks like regurgitated mush shoveled up by Grok.
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Oh. Brilliant. You’re obviously a genius. Sigh.
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But a handful of cherry picked examples doesn't erase the fact that as bad as those things are, they don't hold a candle to the damage inflicted by relentless attacks on education by conse
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No. Check https://www.nationsreportcard.... [nationsreportcard.gov] for comparisons between states.
If you want to drill down apples-to-apples, Louisiana before and after is a great case study.
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It’s admittedly sometimes tricky to deduce ranks directly from nationsreportcard.gov.
As an alternative, urban.org (Urban Institute) crunches the numbers pretty well:
https://www.urban.org/sites/de... [urban.org]
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That’s a lot of words without a shred of factual evidence. Crying “cherry picking” and getting annoyed at “demographically adjusted” data in no way disproves that California has slid pretty far down the state rankings while Florida is near the top, and in no way disproves that Louisiana’s back-to-basics strategy is working quite well. In fact demographic adjustments put Florida right at the very top of K-12 rankings per U.S. News, as it’s adjustments provide bonuses
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A ten point advantage for Florida is nothing to sneeze at regardless, but I am discussing overall ranks - not a particular grade level in a particular area. It’s easy to cherry pick, as you already noted!
For overall ranks, here’s one source:
https://www.urban.org/sites/de... [urban.org]
The main points remain:
- Florida and Louisiana’s “focus on science not equity narratives” strategies are working.
- California, which is undeniably all-in on equity pedagogy fads, has steadily sunk lower in th
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No. NAEP does not “say it’s a lie”, and, “mysteriously” you have yet to provide a ranking list based on NAEP data that disproves my contention. But nice hand waving.
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Sigh.
Re:Study California, Florida, and Louisiana (Score:4, Interesting)
California has been at the forefront of adopting modern pedological science
It's not science, it's art. As a physics professor I can definitely say that a large number of new pedagogical methods are tested on students without much, if any, research backing them up. Even when an attempt at measuring objective outcomes is made it rarely, if ever uses a control group where two instructors teach two equivalent groups of students in two different ways. Instead it usually uses subjective interviews with students which are then analyzed in an attempt to extract some degree of mildly objective data.
Even when you have something that seems to have credible research backing it someone else can try the method only to find that it completely fails for them. The conclusion I have arrived at over the years is that education is far more of an art than it is a science. Indeed, I think a lot of it is based on your enthusiasm as a teacher for the method and subject matter. If you see or develop a cool new idea for teaching something then your enthusiasm is picked up by students who then enjoy the material more and generally learn more.
Re:Study California, Florida, and Louisiana (Score:1)
I definitely agree there’s way too much crappy research in this field. I’ve seen many examples of PhD theses in the pedagogy area where the sole “contribution” is interpreting a few in-person interviews. What’s more, what rigorous research there is in the area is often discounted wholesale because it supposedly increases “disparity” (regardless of whether it improves outcome). Even more concerning is that the foremost researched field in modern pedagogy science is
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Unfortunately the NAEP can be gamed since they sample from schools. Given the track record of states like Florida with things like covid, it's plausible they would do this. Personally, I think the strategies you mention would be effective, but I'd like to see some real research to back up this surprising result. But this is unlikely in the near future...
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Unfortunately the NAEP can be gamed since they sample from
schools. Given the track record of states like Florida with things
like covid, it's plausible they would do this. Personally, I think
the strategies you mention would be effective, but I'd like to see
some real research to back up this surprising result. But this is
unlikely in the near future...
Florida is “gaming the system”? Brilliant logic!
This (probably intentionally) echoes the Critical Theory pedagogy fad that claims standardized tests are racist and “gamed” - but this is a fad which, in reality, many California schools ascribe (one example among many: https://www.latimes.com/califo... [latimes.com]) not Florida.
Want an example of how stupid and self defeating this idea actually is? Many top colleges dropped SAT requirements in 2020 due to this exact CRT analysis. But what happened
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I think you misunderstood. It's not the actual test that would be gamed but the administration of the test. Only a random sample of students is tested from each school and some schools might not participate. One cou
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Too busy threatening the broadcast license of television networks. The fuck your feelings crowd sure does have some fragile feelings. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/1... [cnbc.com]
I mean if that isn't a blatant first amendment violation then what is?
The GOP solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The 10 commandments displayed prominently and bibles for all white students.
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>"If I see a Black pilot, Iâ(TM)m going to be like, boy, I hope heâ(TM)s qualified. â" The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024"
Nice try, picking something out of context, which seems really, really popular now. His discussion was about DEI/Affirmative Action, specifically about airline pilot racial hiring quotas, and how quotas end up lowering excellence by displacing otherwise more qualified candidates. And what effect that can have on people's thinking by casting shadows of doubt. He s
Re: The GOP solution (Score:4, Informative)
Nice try, picking something out of context, which seems really, really popular now. His discussion was about DEI/Affirmative Action, specifically about airline pilot racial hiring quotas, and how quotas end up lowering excellence by displacing otherwise more qualified candidates. And what effect that can have on people's thinking by casting shadows of doubt. He said, as part of a conversation:
If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
In what context is any of that not racist?
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*sigh* You made me actually have to go lookup these random crap talking points. God, these look like they are from that crap source Media Matters no less...
First one is a quote discussing not doing a prisoner swap for a marine but instead doing one for a WNBA player that got herself into trouble. He listed what the leftists thought were the salient characteristics (with the marine obviously being worth less). Sorry, I don't see discrimination there, other than the really old school definition where you can
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the 3500 hours of Fallout 4 I've accumulated,
iirc i played like 100 hours and was still only like 1/2 done through the main story (but it was Ultimate edition so maybe had DLCs too, but i don't even know if i got to them)
Re: Sad, but it's worth it (Score:1)
Say it with me in a kiddy singsong voice, we are going to turn the page, turn the page...
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One day, people will learn that Republicans are neither democratic (chosen by the people) nor socialist (in service of the people), though they keep claiming that.
Re: Sad, but it's worth it (Score:1)
I really am unsure which definition is more comical. One smacks of election denial and the other of extreme naivete.
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Interesting that you consider that post ironic. Or that you think I made an account decades ago to post on irony today. Or for that matter that the person posting primarily during nighttime hours in the target location doesn't have a job.
So, Mr poor conclusions what type of point would you like? Yes, now that you mention it there is some irony that the people trying to kill election deniers now say the winners are not chosen by the people. Also, its always comical when a group wants to be "in service of the
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A nice list. If I hadn't commented on this thread I would up-vote you for the pure density of it.
Abolish (Score:2)
Crap show all around (Score:2)
Overworked parents turning to phones as babysitters combined with a nihlist mindset that hard work no longer pays off, and “why bother since the planet is on fire?”. So you have underprepared kids who don’t see the point flooding schools staffed by underpaid and frazzled teachers. Just a few kids that are way below grade level and not caring drags down the entire class. Various factors have also kept kids from being failed, so they get punted to the next grade to continue dragging every
unique needs (Score:5, Insightful)
"when states and local communities are empowered to tailor solutions to meet the unique needs of students, innovation follows."
No it doesn't follow. School boards in the local community are just as politicized as anything else these days and you are likely to get a set of bible thumpers setting the curriculum.
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> you are likely to get a set of bible thumpers setting the curriculum
Most folks don’t live in a Deep South evangelical area. Pick a random student in the U.S. and it’s FAR more likely he’s exposed to curriculums based on these books:
https://www.newsweek.com/do-th... [newsweek.com]
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>> curriculums based on these books
Your cite doesn't support that at all, its just some books that were in some libraries. No mention of them being in the curriculum, you lied.
Basically a crap opinion piece and this part made me laugh.
"Because, as of 2023, access to porn at school is the civil rights issue of our time."
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Huh. It seems you rather agree with the ”bible thumpers” that these books are questionable in school libraries, otherwise you wouldn’t deflect so vigorously without addressing the contents.
Those books are found in many school districts throughout the nation. Even Wikipedia acknowledges the controversy and popularity, yet, tellingly, “forgets” to quote the controversial excerpts that the Newsweek article includes (https://www.newsweek.com/do-these-books-belong-public-school-libr
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>> It seems you rather agree
Don't tell me what I think. Your brainless censorship would make books you don't like unavailable for everyone. People who don't want their kids to read certain books can just tell them to not check those books out of the library.
Meanwhile "it seems" you admit you lied; "he’s exposed to curriculums based on these books"
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Who’s actually lying here? Here’s a challenge: print out the quotes from that Newsweek article and scatter them in places you know children gather.
Do you think your neighbors will then be impressed by your “truthfulness”? Really?
I strongly doubt it.
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So where's the "curriculum", lieboy? And what makes you think you get to decide what other people's children are allowed to read.
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“what makes you think you get to decide what other people's children are allowed to read”
Exactly. Great point! You’re finally getting it! I am a mature adult that knows exposing other people’s children to extremely adult material is not adult thinking - especially without consent of the parents. Feel absolutely free to have your own children read those books (we know and hope you won’t), but you have no right to slip them to other folks’ children.
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>> exposing other people’s children to extremely adult material
So you're going to take away their cellphones too?
>> no right to slip them to other folks’ children
Where's the "curriculum", lieboy? Keep on running.
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Irrelevant. Notice how you deflected from the main point?
- deliberately exposing other people’s children to extremely adult material is not adult thinking - especially without consent of the parents
- feel absolutely free to have your own children read those books (we know and hope you won’t)
- you have no right to slip them to other folks’ children
Judging by your constant deflection, it’s obviously EXTREMELY doubtful that you would walk up and hand another parent’s child the boo
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>> Notice how you deflected from the main point
The main point was your claim that schoolkids are "exposed to curriculums based on these books". Obvious lie.
My kid did great in school (Score:2)
You can't buy great teachers. (Score:3)
Bloated admin, teaching lowest common denominator. (Score:2)
Hey no one left behind, but no one pushed ahead either.
And Everyone is taking Teacher's Union Money (Score:3)
The Congressmen and women doing the investigation are all taking money from the Teacher's Union. Isn't this a conflict of interest? We're already spending more per student than any other country, and the states that spend the most are definitely not seeing the best test scores in the US. Money is not the problem.