Leaving Kids on Read

The writing is on the wall. The question is whether today’s kids can read it. “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.” NYT Upshot (Gift Article): Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a Generation-Long Decline. “From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.”

+ NPR: Kids’ test scores began declining way before COVID. These schools are making gains. (Hopefully, all the schools making gains aren’t still using Princeton’s Honor Code during tests…)