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 in the lowest category for proficiency. Math scores rose a bit for fourth-graders — a bright spot — but were flat in eighth grade compared to 2022.

“I don’t know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they’re bad,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington. “I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.”

The math scores showed some improvement from a previous downward trend but are still below pre-shutdown scores.

As you can see, despite leveling out, you still have to go back more than 20 years to find math scores this low. It's also worth noting that these are averages which combine students at all levels. If you separate students by performance you find that the top students have reclaimed most of what was lost since 2019 while the worst performing students are either flat (grade 4) or losing ground (grade 8).

But the really bad news is definitely the reading scores. The scores here aren't just low they are historically low.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent...

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Here's the graph of reading scores created by NPR:

As you can see, the decline here really started prior to the pandemic, starting around 2015 or 2016. The reasons for this are not clear and different people have suggested various explanations. For instance, are ubiquitous smart phones and more screen time contributing to the problem?

In a new paper, Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that declines in American children’s performance are echoed in tests of adults’ skills over the same time period. So while we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media, he argues.

Another possibility is the relaxing of federal standards, specifically the No Child Left Behind law put in place by President Bush and later weakened by President Obama.

One thing we know is that fourth-grade math performance improved around the same time the old federal education law known as No Child Left Behind (signed in 2002) enforced strict new accountability requirements. When those requirements were phased out (beginning in 2012) and ultimately replaced (in 2015), math performance, especially among lower-performers, fell.

That's just one possible explanation for the slowdown that the pandemic worsened. Goldhaber suggests learning could also have been set back by the Great Recession, by kids' increased access to smartphones and tablets or by the ripple effects of a decline in kids reading for fun. (Since 2017, fewer and fewer students have reported to NAEP that they enjoy reading.)

Maybe screen time is having an impact because kids would rather watch TikTok videos than read. But also shutting down schools for nearly a year on the grounds that it wasn't safe for teachers to go to work (despite clear evidence to the contrary) made things worse. Remember that unions demanded gobs of federal money which they said was needed to deal with the crisis and make up for learning loss. They got just shy of $200 billion in federal emergency funds and clearly all of that spending hasn't done the job. Sorry, Washington Post, it wasn't Covid that students couldn't recover from it was teacher's unions that demanded months of remote learning.

Both sides of the aisle are calling the new scores a disgrace but that doesn't mean they agree on the cause or the solution.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Michigan), chairman of the House education committee, called the scores “a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies rather than helping students learn and grow.”

From Trump's Department of Education:

The U.S. Department of Education's statement on the 2024 @NAEP_NCES scores: https://t.co/iDcZZZVhxS pic.twitter.com/zxLUoytpEn

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) January 29, 2025

Meanwhile,  NEA President Becky Pringle is tweeting about the Trump administration's decision to rescind a freeze on spending but so far hasn't said anything about the NAEP test results. (She's on Bluesky because of course she is.)

Bending to public outrage, the Trump administration rescinded its executive order to freeze federal spending. They showed us who they are and what they are willing to do at our children's expense to push their agenda. This reversal only demonstrates the need for all of us to speak truth to power.

— Becky Pringle (@neapresident.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 10:55 AM

It's partisan politics first and student test scores a distant second.