High school seniors clocked their worst reading scores since 1992 and their worst math scores in the last 20 years. Only about 33 percent of students who started college this year were capable of reading at a college level.
Those are the dismal numbers published by the Department of Education on Tuesday, releasing results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which Education Secretary Linda McMahon said “delivered a sobering and heartbreaking truth about the state of education in America. Academic achievement is at historic lows.”
“At a critical time right before students enter their next stage of life, more 12th graders are below the NAEP basic benchmark in math and reading than ever before,” McMahon said.
While previous scores have shown 70 percent of 4th and 8th graders not proficient in reading, with similar results for math, McMahon noted the “bleak trend carries through to our 12th graders.”
Sixty-five percent of high school seniors are not proficient in reading, and over one-third of them cannot explain the main point of a passage of literature or define a key word in a sentence. Seventy-eight percent of seniors are not proficient in math.
Seniors are reading at 35 percent proficiency and doing math at 22 percent proficiency, and as Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, said, “Only one in three high school graduates heading to college this year has the basic math and reading skills to succeed at the next level. For many, college has just become a lengthier and more expensive proposition as they scramble to catch up.”
It is actually worse than that. While test scores continue to drop, college admissions are on the rise.
The NAEP scores were tracked comparing 2019 to 2024, and when comparing college admissions in the same time frame, the numbers increased. NAEP shows that, in 2024, only 33 percent of 12th graders were considered “academically ready” for college math and 35 percent were ready for college reading, but that 53 percent were accepted into four-year institutions.
Compare that to the 2019 numbers where a still-unbelievable 37 percent were considered “academically ready” in math and reading, but 51 percent were accepted into four-year colleges.
In early May, McMahon highlighted the outcomes of this issue in a statement to Harvard University — likely the most elite university in the world — which actually started a remedial math program for students.
“This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing ‘remedial math’ program for undergraduates,” she said. “Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this ‘acclaimed university?’ Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected?”
Ultimately, however, the scores compared to the admissions means that colleges are lowering their standards, significantly, while increasing tuition, which suggests that the institutions are cashing in on totally unprepared and incapable students while offering an inherently worse product.
That seems to reek of some kind of fraud. But as McMahon pointed out, that trend has been the status quo for years, and it is dishonest to blame the coronavirus lockdowns alone for that.
“Despite billions in federal spending and countless well-intentioned programs, the achievement gap between students is widening, not shrinking,” she said. “This trend did not begin with COVID — it goes back a decade. Clearly, success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who spends it.”
The Department of Education is pushing heavily to return education to state control instead of federal. That move has the American education establishment, and their friends in the corporate media, shrieking because their scam is being unraveled.
Dopes at NPR attempted to make the dismal NAEP scores about the Trump administration, stating, “This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.”
The first ones released, sure. But the scores are from 2024, when their friend Joe Biden was president.
“The social experimentation, lack of rigor, and identity politicking must end,” Parshall Perry said. “If for no other reason than that we can no longer afford them.”