— Washington According to a new federal research, math and reading scores for 9-year-olds in the United States dropped considerably during the first two years of the pandemic, providing an early picture of the scale of the learning setbacks inflicted on the nation’s youngsters.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education, reading scores have fallen the most in 30 years, while math scores have fallen for the first time in the history of the testing regimen used in the study.
The decreases affected kids of all races and all regions of the country. But kids of color experienced some of the greatest declines, expanding the achievement gap between races.
The majority of the nation’s standardized testing did not occur during the early days of the pandemic; therefore, the results revealed on Thursday provided an early glimpse at the impact of pandemic learning disruptions. As part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often known as the Nation’s Report Card, additional statistics are anticipated to be provided later this year.
“These are among of the greatest losses we’ve seen in a single assessment cycle during the past 50 years of the NAEP program,” said Daniel McGrath, acting associate commissioner of the NCES. “In 2022, students are performing at a level not seen since the 1990s.”
The study represents two years of educational instability in the United States, during which schools were closed for months due to COVID-19 outbreaks. Many children spent a year or more learning from home, and even after they returned to the classroom, viral outbreaks among staff and students continued to cause disruptions.
According to the report, the average arithmetic score for ninth-grade pupils dropped seven percentage points between 2020 and 2022. The average score in reading declined by 5 points.
The disruption caused by the epidemic was especially detrimental to pupils of color. The math scores of white children fell by 5 percentage points, compared to 13 points for black kids and 8 points for Hispanic students. During the epidemic, the gap between Black and white kids grew by 8 percentage points.
Reading scores decreased by 6 points for white, black, and Hispanic kids, respectively.
The study indicated that Asian American kids, Native American pupils, and students of two or more ethnicities did not significantly improve in reading or mathematics between 2020 and 2022.
Geographically, all regions had drops in math, but the declines in the Northeast and Midwest were slightly greater than those in the West and South. The outcomes for reading were comparable, with the exception of the West, which had no discernible difference compared to 2020.
Despite a significant decline after 2020, the average reading score was 7 points better in 1971 than it was in 1978, and the average math score was 15 points higher.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the NCES, described the results as a “sobering” depiction of education during the pandemic.
According to federal officials, this is the first nationally representative research comparing student accomplishment before and after the epidemic, when the majority of students had returned to in-person education in 2022. Early in 2020, shortly before the World Health Organization proclaimed COVID-19 a pandemic, and early in 2022, testing was finished.
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