Our Terrible Education System, Not the Pandemic, Is To Blame for Low Test Scores | Opinion

The latest results for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) recently revealed that eighth graders across the country dropped from an average math raw score of 280 in 2019 to 271 for the 2022-23 school year.

More significantly, perhaps, the amount of 13-year-olds deemed proficient or better in math went from 34 percent in 2019 to just 26 percent today.

But before we blame everything on the pandemic, there are some things to keep in mind. First, the downward trend began a bit before the pandemic, with eighth grade math scores going from 285 in 2012 to 280 in 2020. Second, the eighth graders who took the NAEP tests (8,700 in total) did so from October 2022 to December 2023—meaning these students had been back in the classroom for at least a year and most for closer to two years. That's a lot of time to recover from the pandemic.

As for reading scores, they haven't changed much for eighth graders since the pandemic, going from a raw score of 263 in 2019 to 260 now—a decrease of about 1 percent. Proficiency went from 34 percent in 2019 to 31 percent today, both down from 36 percent in 2017.

The story is similar for fourth graders. In math they went from terrible to worse: 41 percent proficient in 2019, to just 36 percent proficient in 2022, both down from 42 percent in 2013. Like with eighth graders, you could draw a line from their reading scores in the 1970s to their scores today, since there has been virtually no change for either—they started off awful and have continued to be so for five decades.

More to the point, only 24 percent of high school seniors were proficient in math in 2019, meaning, first, that they don't have much room to fall, and second, that our kids get worse in math as they go. Their reading proficiency was also stunningly low: 37 percent in 2019, down from 40 percent in 1998.

As the NAEP revealed, our students don't fare much better in other areas either. In U.S. History, 13 percent of eighth graders were proficient in 2022, a slight decrease from the meager 15 percent who managed to achieve proficiency in 2018. In civics, a whopping 22 percent of eighth graders were at least proficient. The same percentage of high school seniors tested proficient in science in 2019.

We're no standout internationally either. On the PISA exams administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018, the U.S. ranked 9th in reading, 13th in science, and 32nd in math, well below the OECD average (an average score of 478, compared to a baseline of 489). All of this, of course, was before the pandemic.

So what's really going on here? Is it that COVID-19 truly set us back so much, or is that just a convenient scapegoat?

Studies have shown that virtual classrooms aren't as effective as in-person learning, and that lower-achieving students are the most likely to be impacted—exactly what the NAEP showed.

Yet, even Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that these results are part of a considerably longer trend that preceded the pandemic by a decade.

Our entire education system is based on non-scientific methods of teaching and suffers from a terrible lack of standards across the board. For the past couple of decades, for one, we've subjected millions of kids to the so-called balanced literacy approach that teaches them that there are no patterns to the English language and that they are better off memorizing words than learning to decode. I've personally had to help numerous kids unlearn this terrible method, which also encourages them to guess at words and look at pictures rather than texts, even though researchers have known for many years that this is incorrect and damaging. Still, even after the main proponent of this system, Lucy Calkins, has largely admitted to its missteps and failures, many school systems continue to employ it.

The same is true for math and science. We've spent years dumbing things down for kids, not realizing that children need to be challenged in order to succeed. We've bought wholeheartedly into the self-esteem movement, despite the fact that there is no evidence that children need constant affirmation and plenty of evidence indicating that repeatedly telling a child she is smart can actually cause damage.

But there's not only no more criticism, there's also no more failure: Kids don't get left back and grades are incredibly inflated. Colleges are starting to go the same route, eschewing the SAT and ACT, even as the SAT itself is being dumbed-down.

It's not the pandemic that did all this. As Walt Kelly once said in Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Ross Rosenfeld is a former teacher and a college advisor.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.