Years of slipping test results: What’s dragging down US students?

A new national analysis of district-level test scores shows that a downturn in US student achievement long predates the pandemic and has continued in most places through 2024, with the first comparative picture through 2025 indicating a broad, sustained slide in reading and math. Researchers report that a “learning recession” began around 2013, with average annual losses in reading achievement from 2017 to 2019 as large as those from 2019 to 2022. Eighth-grade reading scores have fallen to their lowest levels since 1990, and fourth-grade reading is back to pre-2003 performance. By 2025, students are roughly 0.6 grades lower in reading and 0.4 grades lower in math than their 2015 peers, meaning they are about 60% of a school year behind in reading and 40% in math.

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project—covering grades 3-8 in districts across 40 states and the District of Columbia, representing about 68% of US districts and excluding 10 states due to high opt-out rates or non-comparable data—indicates that in the last year included, reading scores fell in 83% of districts with data and math scores fell in 70% compared to a decade ago. The declines cut across income, race, and geography, and the patterns suggest a long-term drop rather than a pandemic-specific dip.

The contours of the downturn are particularly striking given the two-decade period before it, when math achievement rose steadily and racial gaps narrowed. Between 1990 and 2013, the average fourth grader performed at roughly the level of an average sixth grader in 1990, and similar gains were seen in eighth grade. Those improvements, which some scholars have framed as a major but underappreciated success of social policy, have largely been unwound over the past decade, a reversal likened by one researcher to a slow erosion that gave way to a wider slide.

While the trend is national, the recovery since 2022 has been uneven. Most states have posted math gains since that year, with Washington, D.C., leading the improvement. Federal relief dollars appear to have catalyzed progress, especially in the lowest-income districts, but five states—Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa—did not make math gains over that period, according to NPR.

Districts and states that embraced comprehensive “science of reading” reforms—emphasizing phonics and structured literacy—have seen brighter spots: seven states, plus D.C., registered reading gains between 2022 and 2025, while states that had not adopted those reforms by January 2024 showed no improvement.

Mississippi’s gains in fourth-grade reading have been linked to investments in early childhood education, teacher development, and a science-of-reading model. In Baltimore City Public Schools, which instituted science-of-reading changes before the pandemic, students lost less ground in reading during closures and returned to around 2017 levels by 2022; at one school, a kindergarten teacher reported that three-quarters of her students reached grade-level or better last year. By contrast, New York’s transition remains uneven: two years after the governor introduced a new plan to steer districts toward science-of-reading practices, over 130 districts—about 21%—continue to use older “balanced literacy” and “three-cueing” curricula that ask children to infer words from context rather than rely on phonetic decoding. Researchers have warned for years that these approaches are ineffective, and roughly 46% of New York third graders are reading below basic proficiency.

Researchers have floated several explanations for why the slide began around 2013, including the fade-out of test-based accountability as federal waivers relaxed No Child Left Behind requirements and the surge in smartphones and social media. By 2022, nearly half of U.S. teenagers were online “almost constantly,” and in schools that issue devices, more than 80% of students receive them by kindergarten. Some experts have also pointed to the influence of AI-driven schooling and voucher policies.

Beyond the classroom, chronic absenteeism remains a headwind: 23% of students were chronically absent in the 2024–25 school year, up from 15% before the pandemic. Digital reading appears to offer only modest support compared with print; while it can improve comprehension, its benefits are estimated to be six to seven times smaller than print reading. The broader consequences worry economists and education researchers who see test scores as leading indicators of life outcomes, with strong relationships to future earnings, educational attainment, and even arrest and teen motherhood rates.

State-level finance trends show that money alone has not yet translated into better scores. In California, per-student spending has surged since 2019, rising from roughly $17,423 per pupil when the current governor took office to a record $28,282 per pupil, with projections above $28,000 under the proposed 2026–27 budget. Critics contend much of the increase has expanded bureaucracy, launched new state initiatives, or raised compensation packages rather than directly lifting core academic performance. Recent results underscore the point: Black students’ reading proficiency in California remained flat at 32% between the year before the governor took office and the most recent reporting year, while White students’ reading proficiency declined from 65% to 62%.

North Carolina illustrates a different pattern: students have improved in math compared with 2022 but remain about half a grade level behind their 2019 performance, and reading outcomes are still worse than before the pandemic.