The COVID-19 pandemic wrought serious academic damage as it closed schools and separated students from their physical learning environment. Unprecedented drops in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math proficiency among students in the United States between 2019 and 2022 amounted to decades of lost progress. But for educators, researchers, policymakers and employers who have been tracking students academic readiness, alarm bells have been sounding for a long time. Its past time not only to listen but to act.
While other nations have made robust gains, U.S. scores in reading and math have barely budged in decades. Many of today’s fastest- growing occupations require high-level reading, math and digital problem-solving skills that we are not ensuring our children possess. Today’s kids will become this country’s mid-21st century workforce and we as a nation have failed to prepare them:
Only 32% of fourth graders were at or above proficient in reading in 2022, a share that is better than it was at the turn of the 21st century (28%) but two percentage points worse than it was immediately before the pandemic (34% in 2019).
Just 26% of eighth graders were at or above proficient in math, only slightly better than in 2000 (25%) and much worse than before the pandemic (33%).
