Turns out pandemic wasn’t only cause for student setbacks

Those who thought public school students were recovering from pandemic-era setbacks were shocked last week as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — showed that test scores for fourth and eighth graders have continued to decline in reading and bounced back only slightly in math.

That’s because more than the pandemic is to blame, says Martin West, academic dean of the Graduate School of Education, who sits on both the NAEP board and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. West, the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, discussed the Massachusetts and U.S. results — and the other factors at play — in this edited conversation with the Gazette.

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Chronic absenteeism, worsened by the pandemic, generally has been blamed for declining scores. Is that what you’re seeing?

Chronic absenteeism more than doubled nationwide amid the pandemic and has been very slow to come down and not yet reached pre-pandemic levels. But I don’t think that’s the entire story because the declines in reading achievement nationally started well before the pandemic, as early as 2015. At this point what we’re seeing is more a consequence of a decade of steady declines in students’ reading comprehension skills rather than the consequence of the pandemic.

What else might be contributing?

There are many possible theories, and unfortunately the national data on their own aren’t able to tell us which is correct. The two candidates that seem most plausible to me are, first, the rise of social media and what some call screen-based childhood in the 2010s and what that has meant for students’ reading habits outside of school. And second, the softening of test-based accountability policies that began around 2010 and has continued through today.

Do you mean testing is to blame?

I don’t think that’s accurate. We still test students annually in grades three through eight and once in high school. That remains a federal requirement. We’ve just given states much more latitude in how they act on the results of those tests, and most states have taken a very hands-off approach. So it’s not that students are taking fewer tests, it’s that we no longer pay a lot of attention to the results.

About two-thirds of white, Asian, and non-economically disadvantaged students scored at or above the “proficient” level on the fourth-grade math test, as compared to about one-quarter of Black, Latino, and economically disadvantaged students in Massachusetts, and a similar disparity was seen in reading scores. Would you discuss this disparity?

We have seen in recent data growing inequality in performance between higher-achieving and lower-achieving students. In the just-released 2024 results, the small gains that students made in fourth grade math were driven primarily by gains among higher-achieving students, while the scores of lower-achieving students were stagnant.

The declines that we saw in reading achievement at both fourth grade and eighth grade were driven primarily by declines for lower-achieving students. This divergence extends a trend that began in the middle of the last decade and has led to much more substantial inequality. And oftentimes that inequality falls along lines of demography like economic disadvantage and race and ethnicity.

In the past, national programs like “No Child Left Behind” have worked to raise test scores for low-achieving students. In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey has announced the state’s Literacy Launch initiative to reverse recent trends.

The Healey administration has devoted considerable resources and political capital toward its Literacy Launch program, and I certainly hope that will be an important step toward a comprehensive approach to improving literacy rates in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts gets to pat itself on the back every two years when the NAEP results come out because it is the highest-achieving state in the nation across all four assessments.

But it’s important to keep in mind that there are two Massachusetts stories in this round of NAEP results. One is the “best in the nation” story. The other is that we continue to have persistent learning loss due to the pandemic and that we have declined substantially from peak achievement levels early in the prior decade.

We have also not been immune from this phenomenon of increasing inequality between higher-achieving and lower-achieving students. In fact, the achievement gaps associated with economic disadvantage in Massachusetts are as large or larger as those seen anywhere in the nation.

The patterns we see for Massachusetts in the 2024 results roughly mirror what we see for the nation as a whole. Students demonstrated some progress toward recovery from pandemic learning loss in fourth grade math. They did not make any progress toward recovery in eighth-grade math, where they had experienced even larger declines.

And although reading scores in Massachusetts were officially unchanged because they were not statistically distinguishable from the level that we saw in 2022, they did trend downward in a manner consistent with what we saw nationwide.

Can you explain the slight rebound in fourth-grade math scores? Why might we see a recovery in math alongside continued declines in reading?

We often find that math achievement is more sensitive to what students experience in school — the amount of instructional time, the quality of the curriculum and pedagogy — than is reading achievement, which is more heavily influenced by all that students experience in their lives outside of school. That could explain why we see recovery efforts translating into quicker progress in math than in reading.