It’s the first Nation’s Report Card since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. The scores reflect the state of student achievement in early 2024.
New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.
The tests were administered between January and March 2024.
This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.
After those cuts, the department also canceled about a dozen national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.
NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.
Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.What to make of the test scores
Reading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.
“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago”, Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters.
