Well, anno domini 2024 was another discouraging one in the annals of school reform. Student achievement unraveled, misbehavior and mayhem spiked, anxiety and despair soared, and many kids simply stopped showing up to school. No one knows exactly why, but academic performance has been spiraling off course for a decade now, offering little hope beyond the belief that each year couldn’t possibly get worse. And despite the poor plight of our schools—call it an “education depression,” “the lost decade,” or what have you—many seem all too eager to turn a blind eye to the failings of education’s central mission: ensuring that kids learn!
That blindness starts in the nation’s capital. Consider three important benchmarks to which federal leaders have largely buried their heads in the sand: 2022 PISA, 2023 TIMSS, and 2023–24 state standardized assessments. When the most recent PISA results dropped at this time last year, the U.S. stunk up the international room with its lousy showing in math. It’s a familiar story, but the plot twist with PISA was that our global rankings improved because other countries that typically do better fared even worse.
Then there’s the latest TIMSS scores, released earlier this month, where the United States continued to put the gap in achievement gap—and then some. In this case, our declines in math were sharp and steep, with American fourth graders dropping a whopping eighteen points, and American eighth graders nosediving to levels not seen since the country began participating in the exam back in the mid-nineties. Perhaps most depressing, the gap between our highest- and lowest-performing students continues to widen. AEI’s Nat Malkus painted a stark picture in the graph below, noting that the dramatic achievement gap growth over the past twelve years is a uniquely American problem.
While the rise in PISA rankings was hardly cause for celebration, it was embarrassingly clear that the U.S. Secretary of Education was nonetheless tempted to break out the confetti. And in a response that spoke volumes, the U.S. Department of Education made nary a mention of the abysmal showing by U.S. students on TIMSS.
This brings us to the latest data from annual assessments, now available for forty-one states and Washington, D.C. In the aggregate, state testing offered a less sullen accounting of student performance than PISA or TIMSS, but the results themselves (i.e., nominal gains in math) need to be taken with several dollops of salt. Namely, states like New York, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin were among those that played with their cut scores—the standard by which proficiency is measured—so as to misrepresent the degree to which students are behind.
Now that learning loss has proven to be semi-permanent, policymakers seem to be defining deviancy down, normalizing diminished expectations instead of redoubling their efforts to help students get to where they need to be. And Uncle Sam has struggled mightily to enforce the laws that are already on the books requiring states to provide disaggregated data by subgroup and to test at least 95 percent of their students. Indeed, nearly half the states are falling short of this low bar. Adding insult to injury, several states have bent over backwards to bury the bad news and move the goalposts instead. At best, the celebration is premature until the 2024 NAEP numbers are posted (more on that below).
These three assessments and their results are bellwethers underscoring the stubborn and complex challenges facing state and local leaders and awaiting the Trump administration as it prepares to seize the tiller. The 2024 NAEP results, slated to be released publicly days after the president-elect takes office, are widely expected to corroborate the downward slide. The most recent scores are already at their lowest levels in decades. None of this comes as a surprise to those who have been paying attention, but whistling past the graveyard as the outgoing administration did on education has left the nation’s students adrift.
It's time for education leaders to open their eyes and change course. They need to reignite a focus on student achievement, revive the urgency sparked by NCLB, and rebuild a shared commitment to student success. For starters, let’s throw our support behind states and districts that are trying to do big things, and double down on urban charter schools—arguably the most successful innovation of the past century. If America’s students are to have a chance at getting on track, it must begin with our elected and appointed officials. They are the ones who must fill the leadership void and champion the cause of academic excellence.
