Opinion by Eugene Robinson: Plummeting U.S. test scores aren’t a red-state vs. blue-state thing
Scores in reading in those three states also moved in lockstep, falling by a point or two. Political posturing might have mattered to governors who’d like to be president someday, but it made no difference to the millions of children in the nation’s schools. From the students’ point of view, there was no “right way” to blunt the impact of the pandemic. All strategies, we now know, were equally futile.
in reading is back to exactly where it was in 1992. And performance in math, after a hopeful stretch of significant improvement, is back to about what it was 20 years ago.The pandemic caused math scores to fall more sharply than reading scores. The theory — and it certainly would have been borne out in my household, if I still had school-age children — is that parents were more equipped to help their kids keep on pace in reading than in math.
The story is different, however, for eighth-graders. The top performers and the lowest performers lost ground in equal measure — two or three points in reading, roughly eight points in math.