'Stark decline' in reading, math: 1/3 of 12th-graders are ready for college
- Joanne Jacobs
- Sep 9
- 2 min read
Two-thirds of twelfth-graders in the Class of '24 don't have the reading and math scores they'll need to succeed in college, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
"The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades," reports Dana Goldstein in the New York Times. "In math, 12th graders had the lowest performance since 2005."
Scores are in "stark decline," said Matthew Soldner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
It was a sign that, among other skills, they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech. In math, nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may not have mastered skills like using percentages to solve real-world problems.
In the top 10th percentile, scores remained high, but average and low achievers did worse.
Schools closed in 2020, when this cohort of students was in eighth grade. Many did not return to school until 10th grade. But the trends started longer before Covid. "Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago," Soldner said. "My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend."
“Something fundamental in U.S. schools is broken and we need to fix it,” says Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor.
Students "aren't getting the support they need," said the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which called for "mental health, staffing and academic resources so every learner has the opportunity to thrive.” The prinicipals said "nothing about rigor, discipline, grade inflation, literacy, numeracy, or chronic absenteeism," tweets Rick Hess. "Instead, a plea to not focus on results, do more listening, and spend more on mental health and staffing."
years ago it was pointed out that if a foreign country had done to our education system what the education schools and politicians had done it would have been considered an act of war. It has been a war. A war against the people of this country who believe in the constitution, the Christian faith and the family.
Sorry--something went wrong with my previous comment. I meant to give 5 stars, and can't seem to correct it now.
Another distressing feature--
While it's clear that the bottom has fallen out of US education, don't discount the effect on the average and higher-achieving students, as well.
For a long time ("No child left behind" twenty years ago), interest in education has been focused on the lowest-achieving students. The goal has been to raise their achievement (or, more cynically, to hide the gross gap between lowest and highest by lowering the achievement of the ablest students ). It's easier to lower the latter group, by refusing to teach them at their advanced level, than it is to figure out how to reach the students who don't come to school, or refuse to engage even when present (or have terrible struggl…
Why would anyone be surprised by this as US schools have been on a steady decline since the report "A Nation at Risk" came out in 1983, and many kids simply aren't engaged in school these days, which when I went to school, it was mainly to get an education and prepare one to enter the phase of life known as adulthood...
Additionally, even adjusted for inflation, the US education system (city, county, state, federal) spends almost 3.5 times as much as it did in the 1960's...
Go figure