There’s been a lot of smart analysis of the dismal results released last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—much of which I’ve highlighted in the last two issues of SCHOOLED, my new Substack newsletter.
But here’s an alarming fact that you probably haven’t seen before: The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in 12th grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade. Let’s see how this looks when we glimpse scores by cohort.
Table 1. Average NAEP scale scores in reading, by cohort
* As Andrew Ho pointed out on LinkedIn, Covid knocked NAEP off its normal schedule, so 12th graders were tested in 2024 instead of 2023. It’s the high school graduating class of 2023 that was tested as eighth graders in 2019 and fourth graders in 2015. So I can’t claim that this was the exact same cohort. But for our purposes, it’s close enough.
Sure enough, when the Class of 2023 was in fourth grade, in 2015, they posted the highest average score ever on the reading NAEP (223)—a full ten points ahead of fourth graders in 2000. That equates to about a grade level of progress over the course of just one generation of students. Pretty darn impressive.
Let’s pause on that good news for a moment. What it means is that elementary schools back in the early 2010s were doing a good job teaching reading, or that students in that generation (people who today are about 20 years old) came into school relatively well prepared, or both.
Of course, we know what happened when these folks were about 15 years old, in 2020. The Covid pandemic struck and sent many of them to Zoom School for a year or longer. No wonder their scores fell off a cliff by 12th grade.
But as others, such as Eric Hanushek, have pointed out, it wasn’t just the pandemic. By 2019, this cohort’s eighth grade literacy scores were already showing signs of trouble. Whereas the class of 2023 had the best reading scores ever as fourth graders—two points ahead of second place, the class of 2019—their eighth grade scores were two points lower than those for the class of 2019, for a four-point swing. Given that scores were down just (!) three points in 12th grade, that indicates that much of the damage might have been done by the end of middle school.
(The general patterns look much the same for math, though the class of 2024 can’t boast the best fourth-grade math scores ever; those came in 2013, for the class of 2022.)
The same story emerges if we re-run this analysis for the lowest-performing 10 percent of students, whose recent declines have been particularly dramatic.
Table 2. NAEP scale scores in reading, 10th percentile, by cohort
So what happened?
We know that Covid (and school closures) hurt achievement significantly between the time that our recent high school graduates were in eighth grade (2019) and in 12th grade (2023–24).
But we also know that reading achievement for this cohort sputtered between the fourth and eighth grades between 2015 and 2019. What explains that?
The obvious culprit is the rise of smartphones and social media during this period and its impact on motivation, sleep, and the time spent reading for fun. While others, including Harvard’s (and NAGB’s) Marty West, have come to the same conclusion, none of us can prove it.
But let’s assume that, someday, a smart economist publishes a study demonstrating convincingly that phones and social media are to blame. It’s still not obvious what we should do about it. Phone bans can help between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. But as Mike Goldstein and Sean Geraghty point out, that ignores the real issue—what kids are doing with their devices after school, on the weekends, and especially into the wee hours of the night. Schools can be part of the battle against screens and scrolling, but we’re going to need to engage parents and communities, as well, if we want to get back to the best reading (and math) scores ever.
Author's note: A big thanks to my colleague Jill Hoppe for her help with data collection for this piece.
