The new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is getting a lot of attention today but this headline from the Washington Post is really something else: “Students aren’t recovering from covid. Test scores are getting worse.”
Do student have Covid? Is covid the cause of declining test scores? The answer to both questions is no. Covid is not to blame here, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. First the bad news.
The sobering report released Wednesday from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, showed that the path to recovery remains far rockier than experts had hoped — especially for students who were already struggling the most.
The data showed that reading scores, which had fallen dramatically from 2019 to 2022, fell again in 2024, with a record portion of eight-graders scoring…
