Throughout the COVID years, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has had one solution to the difficulties of operating schools during the worst epidemic in a century: Shut ‘em down! Shut ‘em down!
How has that affected the kids? Well, the results are in, and they’re uglier than Alan Vanneman on a bad hair day. The National Center for Education Statistics reports the following:
In 2022, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted a special administration of the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments for age 9 students to examine student achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020. This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics. [Since NAEP scores are based on samples, all comparisons must be checked for statistical significance. These differences, and all the differences I will describe in the remainder of this article, have been checked and are significant.]
Well, that’s bad enough, but when you break down the data by race/ethnicity, guess what? It gets worse, much worse, particularly in mathematics. In reading, scores for 9-year-old white, black, and Hispanic students all fell by 6 points on a 500-point scale, but in mathematics, scores fell for white students by 5 points, by 8 points for Hispanic students, and 13 points for black students. Nine-year-old black students are now 32 points behind white students, as compared to 25 points only 2 years ago.
Later this year, NCES will report results from “Main NAEP”, more extensive than Long-Term Trend, assessing students in reading and mathematics at grades 4 and 8, both nationally and by state. This will be followed by the release of results for the same grades covering the nation’s large urban areas. I will guess that red states like Texas and Florida, which brought kids back into the classroom as quickly as possible, will make the Big Blues, notably California and New York, look very, very bad, and that “Urban NAEP” will make cities like New York and LA look even worse. If I were Randi Weingarten, I’d be weighing my retirement options very closely. Tahiti might prove congenial. Or, I don’t know, Devil’s Island?
FULL DISCLOSURE AFTERWORDS
I was employed for 19 years, 1995 through 2014, by the American Institutes of Research, working that entire time exclusively under contract with NCES on NAEP. Since retiring in 2015, I have not been associated in any manner with either organization.
