MA Students Tumble From Top Spot In National Test Scores Amid COVID-19

MASSACHUSETTS — Another sign of the tremendous toll that two years of school disruptions took on student learning was historic declines in reading and math proficiency nationwide in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress report card released on Monday.

Those declines hit Massachusetts hard as student scores fell in fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading and math levels, as Bay State students lost their spot atop the national rankings in both fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.

Peggy Carr, who is the Commissioner of the National Center of Education Statistics, said at a Monday news conference that the declines nationwide are "the largest ever recorded" since data was last collected in 2019, and disproportionately hit school districts with equity gaps when it came to remote and hybrid learning during the COVID-19 school shutdowns.

"The overwhelming majority of teachers were concerned about their students' ability to meet the academic standards set forth by their schools, by their districts, and their states," Carr said on Monday.

Nationally, math scores were down 5 percent among fourth-graders and 8 percent among eighth-graders to their lowest levels since 2003. Reading scores were off 3 percent from the 2019 results at both grade levels.

In Massachusetts, scores were down 6 percent in fourth-grade math and 4 percent in fourth-grade reading, as well as 11 percent in eighth-grade math and 4 percent in eighth-grade reading.

"There will be an inappropriate amount of attention on who or what to blame for these devastating NAEP results," said Heather Peske, President of the National Council on Teacher
Quality in a statement late Monday morning. "Instead we should be laser-focused on how we make this right for our children. We know students urgently need our support to recover academically, and we know that teachers are the ones who can make it happen.

"While the NAEP results confirmed our fears, they also underscore how much schools and teachers matter to students."

Carr said half of all students across the country were still learning remotely at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, but that nearly all were back in the classroom to start the 2021-2022 school year. In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education took steps late in the winter of 2021 to push some reluctant school districts back to the classroom with most districts returning to full-time that spring.

Remote and hybrid learning days were not allowed to be counted toward the 180-day school year in the state of the start of the 2021-22 academic year.

Nationally, the falling scores did not appear to be more or less severe in states that had stricter and longer shutdowns than those with lesser disruptions. Massachusetts lost its top spot in the country in fourth-grade math to Wyoming, while it fell behind New Jersey in eighth-grade reading. Despite the declines, Bay State students remained ahead of the rest of the country in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math.

Carr noted that as test scores declined, the number of students who sought mental health treatment increased by 70 percent during the pandemic.

"So this is not just about academics," she said.

The national scores were in line with what the state found in its own MCAS tests that showed declines in both math and English.

Those results released late last month showed English Language Arts declined by 5 percent among students in Grades 3 through 8, and 6 percent in Grade 10, compared to 2021 when a "half test" was administered in younger grades because of the pandemic.

Scores in grades 3 through 5 showed a sharper decline, DESE said, "indicating challenges in early literacy."

"These results show that it may take a few years for students to recover academically from the COVID-19 pandemic," state Education Secretary Jeffrey Peyser said in a statement at the time. "Many students need more time learning, whether it is in the form of tutoring, acceleration academies, early literacy, after-school programs summer learning."

District-by-district MCAS scores for the 2022 spring test session are available here.