Key Points
- The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores underline a continuing decline in educational achievement in the United States.
- The Institute of Education Sciences’ tendency to favor scattered, “one-off” research projects over a unified, coordinated approach has hindered its ability to explain this decline.
- Rather than dismiss 2024 NAEP scores as an aberration, state leaders must understand the scope of this crisis and improve their schools’ teaching and learning practices.
Introduction
By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again.
But continuing that cycle would be a mistake. The 2024 NAEP scores underline a continuing decline in educational achievement in the United States. For years following the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the nation focused on the noble but unattainable goal of bringing all our students up to NAEP’s proficiency level. This two-decades-long focus on proficiency hid one of the most damaging—and worsening—trends in American education: the growing number of students who don’t even meet NAEP’s “basic” level of performance.
To fully grasp the seriousness of the 2024 results, it is important to understand what we mean when we say “proficient” and “basic.”2 According to the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets policy for NAEP, “Students reaching [proficiency] have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”3 For example, fourth-grade students who reach the proficient level in reading can describe the impact of a character’s actions or explain how characters influence one another.
Read the entire report here.
