Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

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.

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.

My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.

One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.

Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.

She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.

It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.

(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)

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

Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.

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.

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.

This is probably a macro economic sign.

It's really really difficult to worry about school when your in a homeless shelter or living in a motel.

https://www.wtxl.com/thomasville/school-bus-dropoff-reveals-...

I do well now , but as a teenager I didn't give a shit about high school. If anything I wanted to graduate early, and get a job to ward off the next eviction.

We really need to go back to occupational training in high school. I should be able to graduate and earn enough to get an apartment. It's not like you can't get a degree in Midwestern Poetry later in life.

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

If you have kids you will need to intervene to give them a good math science education.

Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :

- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series

- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand

- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught

- Geogebra and Desmos web tools

- 3Blue1Brown

- KhanAcademy

I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu8hxgQdvRo&list=PLEInJ-Z4qB...

Let's see Common Core was released in 2010 and by 2014-2015 most states had implemented it. Lets do the math, 2026 - 13 = 2013. Hmmm... You can say funding all you want but in the same 13 years of Common Core funding per student has increased by 50%.

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.

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

(2023)

comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022

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.

As a parent of 2 older kids (post college) and 2 young ones (primary/middle) I think one big problem is the academic expectations for the kids have dropped, and unless they are highly motivated they won’t rise above classroom expectations (even if the parents are pushing them at home). The second problem is what happens outside school: non-stop distractions: phones, iPads, social media, it’s always there. Yes we try to restrict it but it’s like forcing your kids to use a horse and buggy while all their friends are driving cars ; maybe we need to convert to Amish. It’s maddening, really.

So here's a scenario for how AI takes over: instead of creating hyper intelligence, we are stuck around the current level. The average human stops thinking and reduces themselves to an IQ of 70, relying for everything on their phone.

Then AI takes over the world not out of calculated cruelty but by accident, then messes it up by hallucinating. Humans die out to being too thick. AI bumbles on for a bit but eventually model collapse and rusting electricity infra put an end to it.

I’m curious how does it track with class sizes and tracks (remedial, regular, honors, “gifted”).

The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.

The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?

States should pay more attention to Mississippi on how they were able to revamp education in under a decade.

https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...

Children spend an insane amount of time in school yet it has little results.

One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.

A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.

Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.

Just eyeballing those graphs, the striking thing is the difference from the beginning (early 70s) to the peak in 2012. During that period, reading scores only increased by 8 points while math increased by 19 points.

I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.

Note that these are 2023 numbers, not 2025.

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...

Full Senate Hearing on the Impact of Technology on America's Youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawBfCAnbdc

Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U

The title makes it sound like a worldwide claim. I understand this forum is USA centric, but we could perhaps add a qualifier in the title?

I'll throw in my own $1.50 , inflation and all.

There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)

We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.

Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.

I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.

The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.

[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...

screen time and social media

A relatively high share of intelligence and behaviour is depended on genetics which we assume is constant. Education aims to develop the environmental share which has a ceiling but it's all we can do.

Electronic screens have a profound correlation, positive until the 90s and later until today negative. Other independent factors might be financial deterioration and even microplastics. Quantitative estimates vary. I like the comparison with smoking, which started as a status symbol and ended being banned.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that it took over two years for this data to be released after it was collected.

Youth today are ungrateful; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers.

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

Do you think it’s possible to reverse this trend? What concrete actions could help?

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.

We might be entering an era when literacy and math are no longer required by most of the populace. Have you seen these kids do google searches? They just use the voice recognition feature on their phone (yes, they have phones at twelve years old, for some reason) and ask google for what they want. Handwriting is already out the window, what if reading and writing are next? If they can have AIs explain everything to them verbally what do they need to read for?

I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.

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.

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.

There's a lot going on here. Most of it boils down to a concerted, decades-long project by half the country to defund, dismantle and destroy public education. This has infected every layer of education including what goes into textbooks. The Texas Board of Education has typically had outsized power here as they've mostly been the largest single purchaser of textbooks. But also we have the likes of Robert Maxwell who basically owned textbook printing [1], before "falling off" his yacht.

But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.

So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.

But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].

Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].

But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/

[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...

where are the measurements between 2012 and 2020

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.