More news outlets are reporting what many of us have been pointing out for years — the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t actually what caused academic achievement to plummet; it was occurring long before then.
Take, for instance, an NPR News article titled, “Kids’ test scores began declining way before COVID.” Or The New York Times article published this month: “Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline,’ the drops go beyond the pandemic.”
Both articles draw on findings from the latest Education Scorecard, a collaboration between The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research, and faculty at Dartmouth College that tracks district-level student growth in math and reading. (My colleague Josiah Padley has a post here on what the Scorecard found specifically in Minnesota.)
From 1990 to 2013, math achievement “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis, and reading also made gains. Racial achievement gaps were narrowing, too. Then, around 2013 — years before the pandemic — scores started falling. The researchers tie the reversal to two things: “policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives.”
Test-based accountability
The federal education law No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act implemented in 2003 was never particularly popular. But its accountability pressures coincided with a sustained period of rising scores, especially in math, and the biggest gains concentrated among the lowest-performing students. In 2013, the Obama administration began waiving the law’s penalties for states, and more than half (38) took the offer, according to the Scorecard. In 2015, Congress replaced the NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which relaxed accountability goals and, according to Chad Aldeman writing in The 74, set off “a decline in student performance across the country.”
The dismantling of NCLB-style accountability was something that teachers’ unions had pushed for years. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers lobbied hard against testing, framing standardized accountability as punitive and culturally biased. The irony is that the students most harmed by the accountability rollback were, by the data, the same students the unions claimed to champion.
Social media
The other shift that lines up with the turning of the test score tide in 2013 is the explosion of teen social media use. Pew Research found that the share of teenagers who reported being online almost constantly nearly doubled between 2014-15 and 2022, from about 25 percent to close to 50 percent.
The Scorecard researchers note that international PISA data adds weight to this explanation. The test score losses fell hardest on lower-achieving students, who are also the heaviest social media users, and among students spending more than seven hours a day online versus those spending one to three hours. The same pattern was evident in other countries, as well.
Social Use is More Prevalent Among Lower-Scoring Students
Educators quoted in the Times say there is “no question” that device use has decreased students’ focus and persistence. Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA, says schools have responded by expecting less, such as assigning fewer whole books and simplifying curriculum. “There’s no other way, except volume, in order to become a really proficient, fluent, avid reader.”
Device use, particularly to access social media, is connected to lower cognitive abilities, depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, and worse. Australia has gone so far as to ban social media use for children under the age of 16. The U.S. hasn’t moved that far, though many states and school districts have restricted phones during the school day, albeit with mixed results. One Pennsylvania school district told the Times it is still a challenge to keep students’ attention, “even after the district banned personal phones and smartwatches during the school day.”
Where things stand
The Times highlights some districts that are making genuine progress. The Compton school district has gotten chronic absenteeism down to 5 percent of students, which is a remarkable number considering the national estimate sits around 23 percent missing 10 days or more. Minnesota is trying to tackle its chronic absenteeism with efforts such as new individual attendance data reporting requirements to parents and a state-funded three-year pilot program. Because Minnesota’s chronic absenteeism data is released on a two-year delay, time will tell if such efforts are working.
Where they have been implemented seriously, science of reading reforms have shown real results, points out the Times — a move that Minnesota has finally embarked on but could do more with to match other states’ stronger accountability systems. Washington, D.C. is providing bonuses up to $25,000 to highly effective teachers.
But in too many places, the “‘academic, generation-long decline’ doesn’t seem to be a priority,” shared Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute with the Times. “I think the thing that’s going to haunt us, whenever Congress and some states wake up to what’s going on, is that it wasn’t the pandemic.”
As the Times calls out, “something troubling” is indeed happening in U.S. education. But the data has been telling this story for over a decade. The question now is whether the urgency to act has arrived in time for the kids still sitting in classrooms.
