Reading the Nation’s Report Card, from the Dispatch
I have cut and paste this here; I am not making money here, but this is vital, and scary. We are already seeing these results with Fall 2022's freshmen class. What will happen moving forward? How can we maintain college-level learning? There are plenty of time-honored ways to deal with a bad report card. “Forget” it in your locker, bury it deep in your book bag—tear it up and eat it if you’re really desperate. But no amount of deception would be enough to hide the lousy grades America’s schools got this week from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The NAEP tests a representative sample of 4th and 8th-grade students on reading and math skills to determine how their learning compares to past students at that age. Scores were already slipping before the pandemic, but in the latest round—administered this spring—about a third of students didn’t meet the lowest reading benchmark, and math performance saw its steepest decline since the NAEP’s ...