The National Assessment for Educational Progress, called NAEP or the Nation’s Report Card, has long been considered the gold standard for understanding how American students are doing. So bad headlines were inevitable last week when the long-delayed 2024 results for 12th graders in math and reading and for eighth graders in science were finally released.

It is tempting to blame the long tail of the pandemic for the dismal scores. But folks who keep a close eye on NAEP had some provocative analysis. 

Eric Hanushek: It’s not just the pandemic

Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, points out that the 3-point declines for 12th graders between 2019 and 2024 are in line with the long-term achievement losses that he’s been seeing since 2013. In a paper this month, written before the 12th grade 2024 NAEP scores were released, he documented that the learning losses during the pandemic match those that occurred before and after the pandemic. In other words, student achievement is declining for reasons other than Covid school disruptions.

Hanushek calculated that restoring student achievement to 2013 levels would raise the lifetime earnings of today’s average student by an estimated 8 percent and would produce dramatic and sustained gains for the national economy.

Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

Dan McGrath: It could have been worse

Dan McGrath, the retired former associate commissioner for assessments at the National Center for Education Statistics, used to oversee NAEP until he lost his job in March during mass layoffs at the Education Department.

Now he’s sharing his personal analysis of NAEP score data in a newsletter. McGrath points out that the slide in eighth grade science and 12th grade math and reading is “not as bad” as he had expected.

He based that prediction on deteriorating scores for students this age before the pandemic, and pandemic-era losses for fourth and eighth graders. He said he would have expected drops twice as large: 8 points instead of just 3 to 4 points.

Any decline is bad. McGrath said that students who were in eighth grade in the spring of 2024 (and are now starting 10th grade in high school) are less prepared for difficult high school science courses, and students who graduated high school in 2024 went to college or into the workforce “underskilled” compared to students before them.

But given that McGrath had predicted far worse results, these NAEP scores are “kinda sorta good news,” he said. Why did 12th graders weather the pandemic better than eighth graders did, and why did science skills hold up better than math and reading for eighth graders? “I don’t know,” wrote McGrath. 

Related: NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not 

Andrew Ho: Missing data

Harvard University education professor Andrew Ho lamented on LinkedIn that the recent NAEP release isn’t that useful. For starters, the long five-year gap (from 2019 to 2024) between the tests of 12th graders means that we cannot tell if the 2024 results represent a pandemic decline or recovery from an earlier nadir.

That matters. Education policymakers have no way of knowing if high schools are back on an upward track (and should continue doing what they are doing) or not (and change course).

Also, there’s no state data for 12th graders to help us see bright spots to emulate.

That frequency and breadth already takes place for fourth and eighth graders. Leslie Muldoon, executive director of the board that oversees the NAEP test, commented that more frequent and state-by-state testing of high schoolers is a future priority.

Related: A smaller NAEP 

Reversing course and rehiring at the Education Department

Adding tests might seem like a pipe dream in the wake of budget and staffing cuts at the Education Department. All the staffers dedicated to NAEP were fired in March as part of a mass downsizing that Education Secretary Linda McMahon said was a first step toward eliminating the department.

However, the Education Department is now starting to rehire staff to help administer the NAEP exam — a sign that the administration intends to preserve at least one function of the agency that President Donald Trump wants to abolish.

So far two new jobs have been posted — one to oversee the development of test questions and the other to supervise the administration of the tests. These are the first two of at least eight positions that the Education Department plans to fill this fall, according to an education department official with the National Center for Education Statistics who briefed reporters this month.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about NAEP scores was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.