In the last decade, achievement scores have been falling — and gaps have been widening. Why is a huge unanswered question.
This story originally appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Americans have been getting dumber.
Across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas, American achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling ever since.
Will the new NAEP scores — our nation’s report card — coming out on January 29 show a halt to those trends? We shall see. But even if those scores indicate a slight rebound off the COVID-era lows, policymakers should seek to understand what caused the previous decade’s decline.
There’s a lot of blame to go around, from cellphones and social media to federal accountability policies. But before getting into theories and potential solutions, let’s start with the data.
This pattern shows up on test after test
Last year, we looked at eighth grade math scores and found growing achievement gaps in 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 large cities with sufficient data.
But it’s not just math, and it’s not just NAEP. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has documented the same trend in reading, history and civics. Tests like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready are showing it too. And, as Malkus found in a piece released late last year, this is a uniquely American problem. The U.S. now leads the world in achievement gap growth.
Theory #1: It’s accountability
As I argued last year, my top explanation has been the erosion of federal accountability policies. In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. That timing fits, and it makes sense that easing up on accountability, especially for low-performing students, led to achievement declines among those same kids.
However, there’s one problem with this explanation: American adults appear to be suffering from similar achievement declines. In results that came out late last year, the average scores of Americans ages 16 to 65 fell in both literacy and numeracy on the globally administered Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.
And even among American adults, achievement gaps are growing. The exam’s results are broken down into six performance levels. On the numeracy portion, for example, the share of Americans scoring at the two highest levels rose two points, from 10% to 12%, while the percentage of those at the bottom two levels rose from 29% to 34%. In literacy, the percentage of Americans scoring at the top two levels fell from 14% to 13%, while the lowest two levels rose from 19% to 28%.
Theory #2: It’s the phones
The rise of smartphones and social media, and the decline in reading for pleasure, could be contributing to these achievement declines. Psychologist Jean Twenge pinpointed 2012 as the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone, which is about when achievement scores started to decline. This theory also does a better job of explaining why Americans of all ages are scoring lower on achievement tests.
But there are some holes in this explanation. For one, why are some of the biggest declines seen in the youngest kids? Are that many 9-year-olds on Facebook or Instagram? Second, why are the lowest performers suffering the largest declines in achievement? Attention deficits induced by phones and screens should affect all students in similar ways, and yet the pattern shows the lowest performers are suffering disproportionately large drops.
[Related: School cell phone bans have hit most states. Not everyone is on board.]
But most fundamentally, why is this mostly a U.S. trend? Smartphones and social media are global phenomena, and yet scores in Australia, England, Italy, Japan and Sweden have all risen over the last decade. A couple of other countries have seen some small declines (like Finland and Denmark), but no one has else seen declines like we’ve had here in the States.
Other theories: Immigration, school spending or the Common Core
Other theories floating around have at least some kernels of truth. Immigration trends could explain some portion of the declines, although it’s not clear why those would be affecting scores only now. The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has partly blamed America’s “lost decade” on economic factors, but school spending has rebounded sharply in recent years without similar gains in achievement.
[Related Report: The condition of education 2024]
Others, including historian Diane Ravitch and the Pioneer Institute’s Theodor Rebarber, blame the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. But non-Common Core states suffered similar declines, and scores have also dropped in non-Common Core subjects.
Note that COVID is not part of my list. It certainly exacerbated achievement declines and reset norms within schools.
Achievement scores were already falling well before COVID hit America’s shores.
That’s a potent mix of factors that could explain these particular problems. It would be helpful to have more research to pinpoint problems and solutions, but if this diagnosis is correct, it means students, teachers, parents and policymakers all have a role to play in getting achievement scores back on track.
[Related Grant Opportunity: Family literacy program grants]
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Chad Aldeman is a freelance journalist and researcher. He writes about school finance; teacher compensation and labor markets; and school standards, assessment, and accountability. Chad has worked at the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, Bellwether Education, and the U.S. Department of Education. Alderman is the creator of ReadNotGuess.com, a program to help parents teach their children to read, and he served as the founding editor for TeacherPensions.org. Alderman’s work has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, InsideHigherEd, Newsday, the Des Moines Register and more.
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