US Math/Reading Scores Continue 13-Year Decline. Researchers Blame Reduced Testing and Social Media (time.com)
- Reference: 0183263133
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/17/1729245/us-mathreading-scores-continue-13-year-decline-researchers-blame-reduced-testing-and-social-media
- Source link: https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-reading-math-us/
But [3]Stanford's announcement notes that America's schools "were in a 'learning recession' for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013."
> This reversal ended two decades of progress, according to Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford Graduate School of Education, whose data forms the backbone of the new research... The study reframes the narrative of pandemic-era learning loss, arguing that the crisis of the last few years was an acceleration of a problem that was already underway. "The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement," said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, and a lead author of the report...
>
> The study found that the slowdown in learning coincided with two major shifts in American childhood and education policy: the widespread dismantling of test-based accountability systems that defined the [4]No Child Left Behind era and the rise of social media use among young people. Reading scores, in particular, suffered consistently, with the average annual loss in the years just before the pandemic being just as large as the loss during it... Today, 8th-grade reading scores on national assessments are at their lowest point since 1990.
>
> Compounding the problem, chronic student absenteeism remains a major obstacle to improving learning. Though down from its pandemic peak, 23 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15 percent.
More [5]context from Time magazine :
> Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math...
>
> "The decline started around the time that social media's use among teens was exploding, and this was also occurring in a number of other countries," says Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the Educational Scorecard report and a professor at Harvard University... [H]e maintains that it is at the core of the decline in reading achievement. He points out that social media use was shown to be heaviest among the lowest achieving students.
"Some states and school districts are making progress," [6]notes the Associated Press , "largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers."
And "The picture is also brighter in math. Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025."
[1] https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-reading-math-us/
[2] https://educationscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Education_Scorecard_May_2026_Report.pdf
[3] https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/us-learning-student-achievement-falling-long-before-pandemic-study-finds
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
[5] https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-reading-math-us/
[6] https://apnews.com/article/reading-math-test-scores-education-scorecard-7fa4111ad0de934f664ebb984e830d13
Duh? (Score:4, Insightful)
"social media use was shown to be heaviest among the lowest achieving students"
Correlation isn't causation (Score:1)
A lot of times you're going to find kids are using social media because they don't have opportunities to interact in the real world.
Suburbs are isolating as are cars and car based cities. At least for anyone who doesn't themselves own a car.
Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them. Remember it's not enough to have your license you need to actually have reliable and ready access to an automobile so you can get around. It doesn't help that your p
Re: (Score:2)
> McDonald's is going to pick the 50-year-old because they know that person has to show up to work whether they want to or not.
Probably not even "has to" show up, the work ethic (has historically) trended stronger in the elderly.
Re: (Score:2)
50 is "elderly"? Ouch.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot is a website for the elderly.
Re: (Score:2)
> McDonald's is going to pick the 50-year-old because they know that person has to show up to work whether they want to or not.
Eh... the 50 year old isn't going to be as willing to put up with shit from management or overwork themselves as much as someone brand-new to the workforce. They're also more sensitive to things like not having health benefits.
Subburbs, cars, are not isolating (Score:1)
> Suburbs are isolating ...
No. Generations of kids found the suburbs quite social. And they often contained areas inviting outdoor activity where kids interacted. Parks, woods, rivers, lakes/ponds, etc.
> ... as are cars and car based cities. At least for anyone who doesn't themselves own a car.
Kids don't need to own the car. In many cases the parents own the car. For example rather than trade in an old car a kid gets it. Or the parents buy a cheap used car.
Cars effectively enlarged the "neighborhood". As did bicycles.
> Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them.
Not really. Uses cars start around $15K. Which in adjusted dollars is up compared to 1980's $12K but not
Common Core math textbook and curriculum (Score:1)
The summary mentions decline since 2013. That is precisely when Common Core math experienced is "widespread adoption and rollout (2010-14)" [Google] "The Common Core initiative only specifies what students should know at each grade level and describes the skills that they must acquire in order to achieve college or career readiness. Individual school districts are responsible for choosing curricula based on the standards." [Wiki].
We changed the way we teach math. Many of the new books and curriculum suck
Lack of accountability (Score:3, Insightful)
If little Johnny can't read who is actually held accountable? Apparently it's no one's fault so why does anyone have any incentive to solve the problem? The parents don't care, the schools will just pass them through, and the students are too uneducated to be concerned with how screwed they are.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.
They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.
The administrators only want to line their own poc
Re: Lack of accountability (Score:3)
Teachers unions exist to ensure the shittiest teachers get paid the same as the ones who work their asses off.
Re: (Score:3)
Now talk about the police.
Re: (Score:1)
You must have strange unions in your country.
Re: (Score:2)
If teachers are getting such a good deal why don't you go do it.
Yeah that's absolutely correct (Score:2, Insightful)
So when you are an adult you don't go pointing fingers at a problem you just fix the goddamn problem.
Accountability sounds cool until everybody starts fighting amongst themselves uselessly like crabs in a bucket.
You don't go blaming people you recognize the problem and fix it.
Only as I described on another post we can't do that because the problem is structural.
Specifically we used to just kick low academic achievers to the curb and that was okay because we had factories for them to work in
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is exactly "accountability", at least the way it has been used as a weapon to make sure that schools that need the money the most do not get it.
Have you not heard of "No Child Left Behind" whose title belies its true purpose to not fund the schools that need the money the most so that more money can be poured into the schools of wealthier suburban enclaves? This law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalti
"Us" (Score:5, Insightful)
> Us Math/Reading Scores Continue 13-Year Decline
As does slashdot editors', apparently.
Re: (Score:3)
They haven't taken pride in their work in many, many years. Just like the rest of the world.
Chronic absenteeism? You mean truancy? (Score:2, Funny)
Chronic absenteeism? When/where I was a kid, this was called truancy, and the police could pick you up for it. How is this still a thing?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Is the fox news logo burned into your tv?
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> But with chronic illness where do you draw the line?
Chronic illness is rare, and at some point, you try to figure out a way to get the kid tutoring.
> We had a kid at my school, Ferris, who was always sick and then his grandma died.
I see what you did there.
If half your kids are chronically sick, there's something wrong with your school — environmental issues like mold, social issues like bullying, or senioritis like Bueller.
Re: (Score:2)
Nowadays, they call it a "voucher" and the parent gets a few grand to withdraw the kid from school and take them to Disneyland or whatever. Strictly educational uses, I'm sure.
No (Score:3)
> Researchers Blame Reduced Testing and Social Media
I don't think that's the only reason, or even the main reason.
I've noticed that modern parents have become far too lenient and overprotective with their children, to the extent that teachers are being assaulted because they require children to actually learn something.
And to get things words, we have the likes of ChatGPT, where you can abandon thinking altogether.
TBO I have no clue how to handle this. Perhaps homework should be abandoned completely, and learning should only take place within the walls of the educational facility, where children cannot use their smartphones or other "smart" devices.
And from what I've heard that's where education has been headed recently. Probably the class schedule needs to be completely overhauled as well.
Re: (Score:2)
It’s a massive societal failure and not something easily fixed.
Re: No (Score:1)
> I've noticed that modern parents have become far too lenient and overprotective with their children, to the extent that teachers are being assaulted because they require children to actually learn something.
Parents don't care about their children's education - they think their high property taxes remove the need for parents to become involved in their child's education ("That's what we are paying the teachers for, right?").
And the teachers, unshackled from the dreaded "Teaching to the test" regime have decided that their jobs are to be an ally for their students, to expose them to unconventional ideas (Drag Queen Story Hour? I remember when parents used to read stories to their kid's classes, not men dressed a
three(3) (Score:2)
Three hours of homework a night. That's what it takes. Do I hear you sobbing and whining like an entitled white middle-class punk? Consider this: from shell & bone-scratching to algebra took 65,000 years. Now you are given only twelve. Comprehende? End of discussion.
Former teacher here (Score:5, Informative)
Few things happening.
-COVID. It did a huge hit on kids, on their wellbeing, social development, and academic performance. Kids are still getting over the burnout from that.
School issues. Schools are hitting a teacher cliff, and teachers are all burned out from all the extra BS they have to do. On top of that, schools are wildly underfunded for the things that actually matter, and are having a hard time retaining talent as the stress load for teachers just keeps going up, while their salaries aren't competitive.
Someone posted something about absenteeism with a 'back in my day' sort of energy. So, on that- yes, schools will still send truancy officers to check in. A lot of the time, it's kids with serious mental health problems. See the COVID burnout thing, and the next point.
The kids are not ok. If you look at kid's mental health, it's frankly in the toilet, and a lot of it comes down to the world that they're inheriting. They're facing a global warming cataclysm, the rise of fascism, and a garbage economy with no hope of ever achieving the American dream. They're often latchkey kids because both parents have to work to pay rent. They're having AI and social media infiltrating their lives, and have no real sense of community (COVID disrupted so many community programs oriented at helping kids with this, and thanks to DOGE cuts, a lot of other nonprofits that did great community work are dead.) Doing well in school is based around a social contract that ensures that it will have some meaningful payout, and right now, that social contract is a joke.
Re: (Score:2)
This. A thousand times this, especially the last point. We've held out education as a means to a happy, successful life -- and it's not. Not any more. It's become a means to barely surviving in an increasingly bleak world ruled by fascists and billionaires.
And the kids know it. They may not be able to articulate it quite so succinctly, they may not even know what the problem really is - -but they know it because it's all around them. They see it in their parents' faces and hear it in the news. The
Re: (Score:2)
the thing is, the kids aren't stupid. Sure, a lot of them are a bit brainrotted from tiktok, but the boomers brainrot is *far* worse. They're smart, they're able to see the writing on the wall, and they see a social contract that has no reason to continue. And we've failed them, handed them a big steaming pile of shit and told them to get better grades. It'd be laughable if it weren't so sad.
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, that's bs coming from an anonymous coward who doesn't talk to kids. They hate fascism, they hate the right, they hate that they're seeing their country get stripped for resources with the same energy of copper thieves. They don't like the left because it failed to meaningfully protect them, just give them lip service, but the right's insistence that 'thoughts and prayers' instead of common sense gun reform to protect them against school shootings has made it clear where things stand.
Re: Phonics (Score:3)
Phonics-based teaching was coming into vogue when I was learning to read. My parents objected because that's not really how English works, and they weren't wrong; my cohort generally has shitty spelling abilities.
Rote memorization of the basics is about the best you can do, because English is too recently cobbled together from too many different languages to have a consistent spelling system. You need to learn Latin, Greek, French, and German at a minimum if you want to be able to reliably deduce spelling from sounds once you're past the elementary level.
Europeans are probably in better shape on that front than Americans or Canadians.
Re: (Score:2)
spelling is about writing and , tbh , it's largely a waste of time early on.
as an extreme example look at Chinese: thousands of characters ... very little correlation between character and the spoken word.
they've literally invented phonetic systems to teach people to read
(pinyin in PRC but other systems in Taiwan).
Japan similarly used their phonetic alphabet as a bridge to kanji. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also in the US the opposite of "phonics" instruction isn't rote memorization in the classic s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana
Re: (Score:2)
> it's a bizarre "learn to recognize whole words by reading picture books and guessing what the text is from the pictures"
Whole language isn't bizzare. It's how you learn most things. How to speak, for example. Realistically you need both, which is why good language programs will have "picture books" and if you're stuck the teacher will tell you to sound it out.
Re: (Score:2)
and if you're stuck the teacher will tell you to sound it out.
And if you've never been exposed to phonics how are you going to know how to sound words out? I learned to read back in the '50s, when teaching phonics was at its peak, and it's served me well ever since. Being Jewish, I went to Hebrew School and learned to read Hebrew but not, alas, to speak it. Up through my 20s and into my 30s I could sight read it during religious services, but gradually stopped going and lost the ability. Now, I can s
Re: (Score:1)
If you learned whole word reading, you can read every language whole word.
If you know the words.
Hebrew (at least historically, no idea about right now) and Thai for instance have no spaces between words.
Also it is a silly misconception that people who learned whole word reading can not read letters and build up a word with sound, that is a ridiculous idea.
Re: (Score:2)
>> it's a bizarre "learn to recognize whole words by reading picture books and guessing what the text is from the pictures"
> Whole language isn't bizzare. It's how you learn most things. How to speak, for example. Realistically you need both, which is why good language programs will have "picture books" and if you're stuck the teacher will tell you to sound it out.
"sound it out" is phonics... and the problem is that since the 90s many teachers/school districts DON'T say that because they were taught it's bad. and it got religious and phonics was banned as regressive... etc
and yes word recognition is fine later... but literally there are many people who can't up under this program who can't read a word like "realistically". I was shocked when I heard about this a few years ago, but it's a well documented detour much of the English speaking world took.
Re: (Score:2)
This is wrong. Phonics works really well. We have actual data. [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/3516004 [jstor.org] Nor is phonics a new thing; it was how we taught using phonics in most of the 19th century and early 20th century. Other methods such as three cues are actively bad and teach children how to read using the methods poor readers use to read. See [2]https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading [apmreports.org] for an excellent article on this.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3516004
[2] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
Re: (Score:2)
The problem we are talking about is happening at elementary level, so being able to deduce how to spell borrow words at university is kind-of irrelevant.
Social media makes you bad at math? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is like the new "D&D makes you a satanist", only this time the moral panic is coming from liberals.
Re: (Score:1)
Social media makes you bad at a lot of things, when you do it to the exclusion of those things.
I'm bad at math just due to general poor schooling, I don't think my time on AIM and IRC after school was the cause. But something definitely made this last batch of kids dumber.
Education fads (Score:2)
The blame for this falls squarely on the politics surrounding education fads. We abandon the boring things that work in favor for the new exciting crap that doesn't. And it's not because anyone really thinks it works, but because there are billions behind the new crap.
Parental apathy factors into this as well, no doubts.
We know what works, so ask yourself why we aren't using it.
Testing doesn't make you better at math (Score:4, Insightful)
We know what the problem is. 8 years ago when my kid was in high School their math class had 45 students in it and there weren't even enough chairs for everybody to sit. This was not one of the poor school districts either. Not a rich School district but not poor by any measure. Meanwhile covid hit education like a brick.
On top of that parents are working two or three jobs just to keep a roof over their kids head.
We also don't allow public schools to abandon kids anymore and they're aren't any jobs for a high school dropout or frankly even a College dropout at this point. Certainly not something that you can make a living off of.
This means that you've got students who traditionally would have disappeared from the system but are now being educated and they bring the numbers down. Incidentally this is also why private schools look so good, if your grades start to drop in a private school they kick you out almost immediately. They aren't any better generally than public schools unless they have a lot more money and even then they can abandon anyone who isn't making the grade.
So basically a whole bunch of people we used to just toss into factory work can't do that work anymore because we either automated it away or we shipped it to china, and now those kids are still in the system and they are struggling and on top of that you have all the other social problems like covid and the leftovers from that and their parents not having any time because of over work etc etc.
There isn't actually a solution to any of this that doesn't involve massive transformations of society that a bunch of old farts like us are going to veto.
We could make the numbers go up and the class sizes go down by kicking all those kids to the curb but the problem with that obviously is we don't have anything to do with them and now they're just milling about getting into trouble. And we aren't going to do the kind of massive government programs Ala the New deal that would be required to employ that many people who struggle with high school algebra...
On the plus side the declining numbers and the increased cost of managing those kids means that we can point to how bad the numbers are and use that as an excuse to dismantle public education so I guess there is that. Think of all the tax savings for billionaires and all the profit when we privatize what's left of education.
Simple solution (Score:3)
Send the kid to [1]parochial school [smart-words.org].
[1] https://www.smart-words.org/jokes/learning-math.html
Did we really need a study for this? (Score:2)
If you're over 30, go to any store in your city, town, or neighborhood and speak to the kid stocking the shelves. It's truly evident that the world is well on it's way to a "Idiocracy" dystopia.
Repeal no child left behind (Score:2)
Not enough testing? On the contrary - we have too much testing.
Why Johnny can't read. (Score:1)
Between the rise of emoji culture and Orange45's dismantling of education, it's not surprising Cathay will soon surpass MAGA's Red AmeriKKKa.