(AP) — Younger students have regained ground academically after the pandemic’s disruptions while older students’ test scores continue to stagnate, according to the latest testing data released Wednesday by the federal government.
Nine-year-olds rebounded to pre-pandemic reading scores and saw some recovery in math, according to data from a test taken regularly in the United States since the 1970s. The same recovery has not emerged for 13-year-olds, whose average scores in math and reading remain below pre-pandemic averages. In fact, the latest reading scores, from teenagers who took the test in 2024, are essentially the same level as they were when the test started in 1971.
Indeed, the 13-year-olds who took the national test experienced the pandemic’s disruption during formative elementary years of schooling. In a few years, they will have graduated — and they may still be behind.
“The 13-year-olds who took this assessment last year are headed to high school now or are already enrolled,” she said. “Schools won’t have them much longer. We can’t hesitate or wait if we’re going to turn these trends around.”
What the test measures
Typically given every four years, the long-term trends assessment offers a snapshot into the academic skills of American students at ages 9 and 13. Roughly 31,000 students in public and private schools sat for the test in the 2024-2025 school year. Unlike the main Nation’s Report Card test for fourth and eighth graders, which is updated regularly with new skills to reflect changing curricula, the long-term test has stayed largely the same since the 1970s.
American students’ academic achievement was already declining when the pandemic hit. Test scores peaked around 2012, then started to fall, said Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
“We can clearly see that this isn’t just a pandemic story,” Soldner said.
Teenagers are tested on more advanced skills, such as making generalizations from a reading passage and comparing information from charts and graphs. Only 58% met the benchmark skill level in reading and 70% in math, with no statistically significant improvement from 2023.
Fewer students are reading for fun
Compounding the issue of stagnant literacy rates: Fewer students than ever are reading for fun.
Still, younger children have shown an “incredibly encouraging” recovery academically in recent years, Soldner said. “Almost 50 years of progress has been eliminated” for 13-year-olds, he said.
The 13-year-olds who took the most recent test would have been in second or third grade during the first year of the pandemic. They would have returned to in-person learning in fourth or fifth grade and taken this national test in their last year or two of middle school.
Those experiences are dramatically different, Soldner said, as the older group would have missed foundational years in building literacy and computational skills in school.
“We have made progress in the past, from the early ’70s to 2012,” Miller said. “Can it be done again? Absolutely.”
