The Bad News Isn't So Bad, But There Is No Good News

Eakinomics: The Bad News Isn’t So Bad, But There Is No Good News   As described in Tom Lee’s analysis of recent education data, in September the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the special 2022 iteration of the National Assessment on Education Progress (NAEP) Long-Term Trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments for 9-year-old students across the United States. A furor ensued.   Typical of the response was Bloomberg, which under the headline “Pandemic Learning Loss Is a National Crisis” ran an op-ed by its founder that proclaimed: “In two years, the average reading score fell by five points, the largest drop since 1990. In math, scores dropped seven points, the first decline of any kind in the 50-year history of the test. Based on these results, the pandemic wiped out 20 years of student gains in both subjects.”   Lee studies the LTT data and finds looking at average scores conceals the real story: Attainment losses are concentrated in the lower tail of the distribution. For math scores (below), the loss is about 7 percent at the lowest decile, but only 1 percent in the top decile.     A similar pattern prevails for reading scores.     His (sensible) conclusion is that two decades of progress were not wiped out. Instead, there were modest pandemic-related losses that should be addressed in the middle and top of the distribution, while there needs to be a concentrated effort at stemming the losses at the lower end.   In short, the bad news isn’t so bad, at least in Eakinomics’ view.   This usually is the cue to tell the reader the good news, but there really isn’t any. Prior to the pandemic, the NAEP, given every two years, showed that scores were stagnant or declining. The picture for fourth-grade math scores is in the table below. There is a tiny rise in the fraction with advanced proficiency, but nothing to write home about. Elsewhere, scores are flat or declining.     For completeness, here are the fourth-grade reading scores.     Lee’s paper has a lot more detail and nuanced analysis, but it is hard to come to any other conclusion than that the schools are in deep trouble and they are putting the nation's future in peril.