ATLANTA -- The emerging snapshots of student learning from state exams and the National Assessment of Educational Progress confirm predictions that COVID-19 would create drastic academic gaps.
A new analysis of student performance by the Center for Reinventing Public Education describes the pandemic “as a wrecking ball for U.S. public education, bringing months of school closures, frantic moves to remote instruction, and trauma and isolation.”
Most reactions to the dismal performance of 9-year-olds on NAEP in mathematics, released earlier this month by the U.S Department of Education, feature the words “alarming,” “crisis,” and “disastrous.” The department itself called the 5-point decline in reading and 7-point drop in mathematics between 2020 and 2022 “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics.”
