America’s Falling Test Scores and the Power of Parental Anxiety

This past Monday, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a program that bills itself as “the Nation’s Report Card,” released its first set of findings since the start of the pandemic. The main N.A.E.P. assessment, which is administered to fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders every two years and measures their proficiency in math and reading, showed the biggest drop in scores in the thirty-year history of the test. The response in the press, predictably, was filled with a great deal of catastrophizing. “New NAEP Test Scores Are a Disaster. Blame Teachers Unions,” a Washington Examiner headline read, a sentiment echoed by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which wrote that the results proved that “pandemic lockdowns were a policy blunder for the ages, and the economic, social and health consequences are still playing out.”

The news coincided with another ongoing saga in American education: this coming Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the future of affirmative action. A decision on two cases—one against Harvard and another against the University of North Carolina, both brought by the conservative legal advocacy organization Students for Fair Admissions—is expected sometime this term.

The timing of these two events is accidental, but both speak to burgeoning anxieties about young people that cut across racial and class lines. These days, nobody—not even the rich—seems all that sure that their children will live better, or even slightly less privileged, lives than they did. That fear has only been made worse by the pandemic, and the constant stream of stories about falling ACT and SAT scores, learning loss, and a generation of children who, absent some large-scale intervention, may fall well short of expectations.

Preoccupations like these have fuelled a revanchist current in education, which has taken many forms. Freak-outs over critical race theory and book bans—which, at their core, were attempts to remove perceived threats to the old forms of meritocracy—will seem tame in comparison to the coming school wars, as parents worry about the potential closure of traditional pathways toward a professional life. Over the next decade, the scarcity mind-set that says that the only path toward class mobility runs through exclusive academic institutions will intensify, and, in turn, bring education into a new political prominence.

Just hours after the N.A.E.P. released its results, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap. A press release from DeSantis’s office boasted that his policy of keeping schools open through the pandemic represented the state’s “commitment to closing achievement gaps.” “We insisted on keeping schools open and guaranteed in-person learning in 2020 because we knew there would be widespread harm to our students if students were locked out,” DeSantis said. “Today’s results once again prove we made the right decision.” He went on to point out that Florida’s fourth graders ranked third in the country in reading and fourth in math, and saved a little dig for the “lockdown” blue states California and New York, which “aren’t even in the top 30.”

I’ve written about education for the past few years, and one thing I’ve found consistently is that it’s incredibly difficult to create a convincing argument out of the mountains of data that schools generate every year. That doesn’t mean that people don’t try, and much of the silliness that surrounds education discourse and policy comes out of the bad math that people do in their supposed effort to teach kids how to do better math. Politics too often becomes a frenzy over who can pick the right numbers out of a data set to justify what are ultimately political decisions. It’s clear that here DeSantis is doing some cherry-picking: fourth graders in Florida have been on a long-term upward trend since 2005, and, although that didn’t slow down during the pandemic, it’s a fool’s errand to try to pinpoint the exact effects of keeping schools open. Given that the concern is about learning loss over time, you can’t assess one state’s performance merely in comparison with other states; what really matters is how one state did relative to its recent past.

Some of the coverage of the N.A.E.P. results has focussed on deepening inequalities between racial groups. But a closer look at the numbers shows that, across racial lines, students’ scores mostly fell in lockstep. The average math test scores for Black and Hispanic eighth graders fell seven points each (from a 260 average score to 253 and 268 to 261, respectively). Asian students’ scores also fell seven points, from 313 to 306. These declines are about the same as the fall that white students took, from 292 to 285. Reading scores for eighth graders seem to have been even less affected by the pandemic, and some racial achievement gaps in that category actually got smaller. The results across different student competencies were similarly mixed. While high-performing fourth graders suffered less learning loss than low-performing kids in math and reading, the results for eighth graders showed a much more uniform decline across all competencies.

What we seem to have, then, is as close to an equal-opportunity problem as one can find in this country. Everyone’s scores are down, and the relatively small differences between racial groups on one test could very well be attributed to a whole range of inputs, including the fallibility of standardized testing.

For better or worse, the universality of this decline is what will move the needle politically. It’s one thing for parents who have every reason to be confident in their child’s advantages to worry that poor minority kids in their cities aren’t measuring up to standards; it’s quite another for those same parents to suddenly get told that their own kids are behind, too.

But, even if declining scores are worrisome, we don’t have to treat the N.A.E.P. results as a catastrophe, or something that requires us to reify existing hierarchies. It makes sense that, if students miss school for an extended period and are taken out of the classroom setting during a multiyear plague, they likely won’t do all that well on a standardized test, especially if they haven’t taken one in more than two years. Over the past two years, studies conducted in the United States and Europe showed that students were falling behind in most subjects. Given that reading scores experienced only a small decline and math scores didn’t crater in a disastrous way, the somewhat boring but ultimately correct conclusion might just be “Hey, it could’ve been worse.”

That, of course, will not stem parental anxiety, nor will it curb the opportunism of political actors who gain from making parents think that their children are in crisis. Every set of scores that gets printed will kick up the outrage machine, which will spit out invectives at teachers’ unions, progressive politicians, or whoever else can absorb the blame. The rub, of course, is that the scramble for resources would likely continue even if the test results were better. The panicked parents are panicking again because it’s in their best interest to do so.

The pandemic and its interruptions to schooling presented an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to public education as a common good. But, instead, we’re likely looking at an increasingly polarized school system, where remediations for struggling students might take up even more classroom time, and, in turn, accelerate the already growing demand for tracked and gifted-and-talented programs. Competition for spots at exclusive schools will only intensify, and no amount of data literacy will change the screaming headlines about the disaster in schools. The parents who have the time, resources, networks, and influence to dictate how things go in the aftermath will almost certainly win out, because they usually do.

As the parent of an elementary-school child, I understand the impulse to worry. I thought school closures in my progressive West Coast city went on too long. I’ve picked up brochures from tutoring centers, researched Russian math schools, purchased more than a few supplementary-learning books, and spent countless hours with my child to insure that her education will not be a casualty of the past two years. Like everyone else, I invoke the mantra “I’m just trying to do what’s best for my kid.” But it’s clear to me that the blame game that politicians and pundits are playing will do nothing to ameliorate learning loss; nor will anyone be helped by further polarization of children’s successes and failures. My kid might be a winner in an intensified academic race, or someone else’s might be, but the greater chance that both will struggle is harmful to us all. ♦