Education Week - September 21, 2022 - 4

Digging Deeper Into the Stark Declines
On NAEP: 5 Things to Know
By Sarah Schwartz
Recently, new national data confirmed
what educators, parents, and
other studies have warned about for
months: The pandemic has massively
disrupted students' learning.
Long-term trend data from the
National Assessment of Educational
Progress showed that 9-year-old students
scored, on average, five points
lower in reading and seven points
lower in math in 2022 than did their
pre-pandemic peers in 2020. The declines
represent the largest drops in
decades.
The results underscore the steep
challenge ahead for schools as the
2022-23 year begins. But NAEP data
are notoriously hard to interpret. Here
are five key takeaways from the data
release, how to make sense of the
findings, and what NAEP can-and
can't-illuminate about the effects of
the past two years.
1. This is a substantial decline.
When the results came out, Peggy
G. Carr, the commissioner of the National
Center for Education Statistics,
which administers the NAEP, called
the score drops " sobering. "
" It's clear that COVID-19 shocked
American education and stunted the
academic growth of this age group of
children, " she said.
But it can be hard to understand exactly
what these score declines mean
from looking at the numbers alone.
Reading scale scores dropped from
220 to 215; math scores dropped from
241 to 234. It's easy to ask: Is an average
loss of less than 10 points in each
case really that big of a deal on a scale
of hundreds?
Researchers, both at NCES and outside
of the agency, emphatically say yes.
Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty
and inequality in education at Stanford
University, said that a 13-point decline-the
amount that Black students
lost in math-can be thought of as
about equivalent to a year of schooling.
" That doesn't mean that kids forgot
a year's worth of things, because these
are different kids, " he said. Instead, it
means that 9-year-old Black students
in 2022 are about a year behind where
9-year-old Black students were in 2020.
The scale scores represent real
skills. For instance, 9-year-olds who
score around the 200 level in math
can typically add 2-digit numbers and
know basic multiplication skills, Carr
said in a briefing on the results.
But as the NAEP data show, math
scores have shifted downward. Fewer
of the 9-year-olds in 2022 are fluent in
these skills-adding 2-digit numbers
and basic multiplication-than their
same-age peers were just two years ago.
This decline in scores is new for
9-year-olds' long-term trend data. For
the past two decades, student scores
have gradually trended up before flattening
right before the pandemic.
These new 2022 scores are similar
to those seen about two decades ago.
But Carr cautioned that this doesn't
mean those years of upward progress
are gone for good. " I think recovery is
a real reality here, and we need to look
to the future, " she said.
But will it take another 20 years
to raise scores once again? Students
scores by 2020 were the result of years
of increases, including big jumps during
the late 1990s through mid-2000s.
" That's the wrong question, " Reardon
said. " The question is: What's
going to happen for these [9-year-old]
kids over the next years of their lives? "
Children born now will, hopefully,
attend school without the kinds of
major, national disruptions that children
who were in school during the
pandemic faced. Most likely, scores
for 9-year-olds will be back to normal
relatively soon, Reardon said. Instead,
he said, we should look to future scores
for 13-year-olds, which will present
a better sense of how much ground
these current students have gained.
4 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 21, 2022 | www.edweek.org
What the national assessment can-and
can't-illuminate about the effects of the past
two pandemic years
Assessment Governing Board, which
oversees the exam.)
These data do suggest that schools
should focus on supporting students'
math skills, but not at the expense of
reading or other subjects, said Christy
Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow for accountability
and assessment at ExcelinEd,
an advocacy group founded by
Jeb Bush, Florida's former governor. " If
you look at the trends from the previous
years before COVID, they were stagnant "
in math and in reading, she said.
3. Gaps between higherperforming
and lower-performing
students are widening.
Students at all levels lost ground during
the past two years, but lower-performing
students saw the biggest drops.
" There has been more impact over
the last two years for those who are already
struggling the most, " Carr said.
These results are the continuation
of a trend in NAEP data-the gap between
higher-performing and lowerperforming
students is getting wider.
Just what is causing that is unclear,
but there are some clues: Lower-performing
students on the test were also
less likely to report that they had support-like
reliable internet access, or
interaction with a teacher-than their
higher-performing peers.
And just as the academic effects of
the pandemic have been distributed
unequally, so have the consequences
for student mental health-a factor
that greatly shapes children's ability
to learn and engage in school.
Over the course of the past two
SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics
And Carr emphasized that the
goal shouldn't just be a return to the
pre-pandemic status quo, noting
that NAEP scores already showed
big gaps between higher- and lowerperformers
before COVID. " One has
to ask themselves: 'recovery,' what
does that mean, to go back to where
we were before? I don't think we want
to go back to where we were before ...
we want to do better, " she said.
2. Declines in math were
more sweeping than declines
in reading-following an
established pandemic trend.
Reading scores in the long-term
trend assessment were mixed: On average,
scores fell 5 points. But among
some subgroups-students in cities,
students in states in the West-they
held steady. The drop in math scores
was more pervasive, affecting more
subgroups across the board.
These results are in line with other
pandemic-era reports on student learning
and progress. Analyses of interim
tests given periodically in some classrooms
from the 2020-21 and 2021-22
school years have found that students
are further behind their pre-pandemic
peers in math than in reading.
Another study of interim test data
found that students who were on
grade level in reading at the beginning
of the 2020-21 school year stayed on
track throughout the spring and fall
2021-but that wasn't true in math.
In math, all students, even those who
started the 2020-21 school year on
grade level, improved at a slower rate
during the pandemic.
It's hard to know why math seems
to be more affected than reading
by school disruptions. It could be
because math is almost exclusively
taught in schools, unlike the reading
practice kids get on their own at
home. " One hypothesis ... is that research
has shown that math is more
uniquely influenced by what happens
in school, " Martin West, the academic
dean at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education said in a public briefing.
(He is also a member of the National
years, experts have stressed the intertwined
nature of academic achievement
and social-emotional support,
and have argued that academic recovery
efforts must also attend to students'
mental health and feelings of
belonging in school.
" I would be surprised if this was a
permanent shock, " said Reardon, referring
to the overall downward NAEP
trend. But, he added, " the big worry is
that this exacerbated inequality, and
will the rebounds be unequal? "
4. Some students' scores didn't
decline, but it's hard to know why.
Results from some student subgroups
don't match the general downward
trend. In a few instances, scores
held steady.
Reading scores for students in cities
stayed constant, as did reading
scores for students in the West of the
country. English-language learners
also maintained their scores in reading
between 2020 and 2022. In both
subjects, there were no significant
changes for Asian, Native American,
or multiracial students.
The long-term trend data alone
can't explain why this is the case. Take
the finding about reading scores in cities.
" We don't really have any national
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Education Week - September 21, 2022

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