Nation’s report card: WA student achievement gaps widen, Covid struggles continue
![caption: Seattle School for Boys 6th-grade teacher Buck McKenna welcomes students back to the classroom on the first day of school, Monday, September 13, 2021, in Seattle.](https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/4bb3f6ee4b0d7bc1e9e5480acc2bb6a9.jpg?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&fit=clip&crop=faces&auto=format&w=924&h=634)
The results from the latest “nation’s report card” are out — and it’s not pretty for Washington state.
Washington students have not bounced back from the vast academic declines of the pandemic, and the state’s achievement gaps are worsening, according to 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores released Wednesday.
Take eighth grade math: The average score among low-income students was 36 points lower than their peers. On that same test, Hispanic students had an average score 35 points lower than white students.
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“The kids that struggled are struggling more,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington. “I look at these results and I’m like ‘Ugh, this is bad for now — but it’s really bad for the future.’”
The federal exam, also commonly referred to by its acronym NAEP, is the only nationally-representative assessment of student achievement in math and reading. It’s administered every two years to about 500,000 fourth and eighth graders in public and private schools in all 50 states — plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — and 26 big-city school districts.
The 2024 results paint a bleak picture of student achievement and pandemic recovery efforts across the country. It comes after 2022 NAEP scores revealed an unprecedented academic downturn after two years of dramatically disrupted Covid-era education.
Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, started a briefing for reporters on Tuesday on a somber note.
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“The news is not good,” she said. “We’re not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground that our students lost during the pandemic.”
Nationwide, reading scores have fallen even further among both fourth and eighth graders since 2022. And although there was a tiny two-point gain in national fourth grade math scores from 2022, there was no significant change in eighth grade and average scores in both grades remain lower than they were in 2019.
What’s perhaps more concerning: Federal officials said this plunge in student achievement, particularly reading, appears to predate Covid.
“This is not just a pandemic story,” Carr said.
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In Washington state, students are performing on par or slightly above the national average at both grade levels and subjects. But to Goldhaber, that’s not saying much.
“My take is that Washington, from what I see, is not really an outlier in any particular way,” he said. “But it’s bad not to be an outlier right now.”
And like most other states, Washington’s scores in both subjects and grades remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic times.
“I think this is just one more piece of evidence to suggest that even though it may feel like we are back to normal, student achievement is not back to normal,” Goldhaber said.
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Fourth grade math is the only place Washington showed slight improvement. The average score ticked up three points from 2022, but remains two points below the 2019 level.
In eighth grade math, the state’s average score is 12 points down from where it was in 2019.
Reading scores tell a similar story: The average score in eighth grade has slipped seven points from 2019, and in fourth grade, it’s down four points.
This lack of progress in Washington and across the country is particularly disappointing, Goldhaber said, after schools received billions of dollars of federal Covid relief aid to address things like learning loss. That funding expired last fall.
“I can’t help but feel like maybe more could have been done with the extra money,” he said.
But what’s even more concerning, Goldhaber said, is the growing achievement gap between high-achieving and lower-performing students, in Washington and all over the country.
This trend is somewhat masked when average scores appear to be mostly flat, as they do this year, Goldhaber said. But it shouldn’t be overlooked.
Achievement gap widens
Federal officials said the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students across the nation is wider than it’s ever been in the history of the test.
In Washington, the starkest examples of this yawning achievement gap are in eighth grade math. But it’s evident in other areas, too.
In fourth grade reading, for example, low-income students had an average score 29 points below their peers. And the average score for Black students in eighth grade reading was 26 points lower than white students.
These kinds of disparities may have devastating effects in the decades to come, Goldhaber said. Standardized tests aren’t everything, and don’t tell the full story.
But, Goldhaber said, they are a measure of what kids are learning, and that can predict what happens to them later in life.
“This means that there are a lot of kids who are going to have diminished potential for college and the workforce,” Goldhaber said. “I think it also portends greater social inequality when we think about issues like wages.”
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State Superintendent Chris Reykdal said Wednesday he’s proud to see that Washington students “continue to outperform many of their peers across the nation.”
“This assessment is the only reliable tool we have to compare our progress with the country, and there are very few states that outperform Washington’s students,” he said. “However, the overall results for the nation and Washington are not good enough.”
Reykdal wasn’t surprised by the state’s reading scores, given the dwindling number of children reading for pleasure over the last decade or so. He’s more worried about math, especially at the eighth grade level — a critical year as students make the jump from middle to high school.
“I really think that’s concerning for the country and especially for Washington state,” Reykdal said. “We’re going to be doing a lot more in the next year or two to try to rethink middle school mathematics and where we go from there.”
Reykdal said his office is going to review how districts are spending money for professional learning. Going forward, Reykdal hopes to put an extra focus on teacher training in math, particularly at the late elementary and middle school levels.
And he doubled down on his calls to improve state education funding, as many districts grapple with a perfect storm of skyrocketing operation costs, declining enrollment, and chronic underfunding.
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All of that has forced schools to divert millions of dollars raised from local levies, Reykdal said. Levy funding is supposed to go towards tutoring, technology, extra help in the classroom — things that could make a big difference in reading and math achievement. Instead, those dollars are increasingly used to cover special education and other basic expenses.
Washington should also direct more funding to districts and schools with higher populations of students in poverty, Reykdal said.
“The income gap has been persistent in math, even more so than reading, for a very long time,” he said. “We have always got a lot more work to do, particularly with high-poverty youth and high-poverty communities.”