If the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were a report card for the country, the envelope would be stamped “Please call your parents.”
The 2024 NAEP results — widely known as the nation’s report card and run by the National Center for Education Statistics under the U.S. Department of Education — landed like a cold splash of reality: reading and math scores for 12th graders have slipped to levels not seen in more than two decades.
Cue the ceremonial sighs, the press releases, and the policymakers doing the two-step between blame and Band-Aids.
Why it matters (because, evidently, it still does): NAEP is one of the best gauges of how schools are performing across the country.
These 2024 assessments were the first national measures for 12th-grade reading and math and for eighth-grade science since the pandemic tossed the schoolhouse rules into the air like confetti.
But the declines began before COVID-19 thudded down — which makes everything more complicated (and political).
The numbers are not subtle.
The average reading score for 12th graders was the lowest since NAEP first administered the reading test in 1992 — down three points from 2019 and 10 points from 1992.
Thirty-two percent of 12th graders scored below the NAEP Basic level, meaning they struggled to locate and identify details in a text.
Math? Also grim.
The average 12th-grade math score was the lowest since 2005 (the year NAEP changed its math framework), and 45 percent scored below NAEP Basic.
Eighth-grade science slipped too — the average score fell for the first time since this iteration of the assessment began in 2009, with 38 percent below NAEP Basic.
“These results are sobering,” said Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
He pointed to “significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students, continuing a downward trend that began even before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Sobering, yes. Also unnerving, especially for anyone who remembers being forced to diagram sentences in junior high.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon delivered the kind of take that mixes outrage with policy prescription: “Today's NAEP results confirm a devastating trend: American students are testing at historic lows across all of K-12… The lesson is clear. Success isn't about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested. That's why President Trump and I are committed to returning control of education to the states so they can innovate and meet each school and students' unique needs.”
Her statement lands in the familiar territory of federal-vs-state schooling debates — and will surely be replayed with increasingly dramatic graphics.
So what’s driving this decline?
The official answers range from systemic (resource inequality, uneven recovery from pandemic learning loss) to cultural (kids stare at phones like monkeys at glowing gods).
Experts and op-eds have been waving smartphones and social media as suspect No. 1; after all, attention is a finite commodity, and TikTok is taking its toll.
But correlation is not destiny — and the truth is messier.
Pandemic-related learning losses, teacher shortages, churning curricula, and funding battles all play their part.
Still, the question nags: how can nearly half of U.S. high school seniors score below the basic level in math and reading when we spend billions on K–12 education every year?
As McMahon put it, “If America is going to remain globally competitive, students must be able to read proficiently, think critically, and graduate equipped to solve complex problems.”
That’s a clear-eyed goal. Less clear is the two-way street between spending, governance, and outcomes.
As the White House put it back in March 2025 in a statement, “closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them [and] ultimately, the Department of Education's main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.”
That’s one policy direction. There are others.
If you want a quick takeaway that doesn’t fit neatly into partisan columns: this is a national problem with local causes and local solutions — but national stakes.
We can bicker about who gets to sign the checks and who gets to set curriculum, or we can ask what schools, communities and families actually need: stable, well-supported teachers; targeted remediation; less testing-focused theater and more literacy and numeracy scaffolding; and yes, strategies to help young people manage attention in a smartphone-saturated world!
So let’s ask the question everyone pretends to be asking between the retweets and the op-eds: how come we haven’t heard more about this?
Maybe because declines creep in quietly, between election cycles and streaming seasons.
Maybe because bad news about schools upends comforting narratives about progress and prosperity.
Maybe because fixing it is hard, expensive and boring compared with culture-war headlines.
But for the sake of every graduate walking into a workplace, college or the armed forces this year, “boring” and “hard” are not good excuses.
The nation’s report card just came back, and it’s not a good draft. Time to read it — literally — and act!!
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