Georgia’s math and reading scores on ‘nation’s report card’ remain flat

Georgia eighth graders fared better in reading with 68% of test takers scoring at or above ‘basic’ and 56% reaching that threshold in math. Both were close to the national average. Reading scores were a percentage point lower than they were in 2022. Math scores dropped about 4 percentage points.

“Georgia students continue to recover from the pandemic,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said in a news release. “Multiple data points indicate we are moving in the right direction, but more work is needed.”

Credit: Bob Andres

Credit: Bob Andres

Some educators may fret about a drop in fourth grade reading scores, since experts often cite third grade as the year where students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” However, Dana Rickman, president and CEO of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, said there are several factors at play.

“One of the reasons (for lower scores) is these aren’t the same fourth graders that were tested two years ago,” Rickman said. “The year that they were getting the foundations of reading was the most disruptive year (in school). So it’s not surprising that now, a couple (of) years later, (scores are) going down.”

Rickman also noted that the renewed focus in some districts around literacy instruction based on research called “the science of reading” is fairly recent.

“A lot of the work that Georgia is doing and all of the reading reforms are just now getting going,” she said. “It takes a while for this stuff to catch up in the data.”

Rickman also pointed to a trend that has also been flagged by the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP. Scores started trending downward before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic, yes, exacerbated (scores), but it was already happening,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said during a webinar Wednesday.

Carr pointed out that while high-performing students continued to improve their scores, lower-performing ones kept dropping.

“This is a sobering finding … 40% of our fourth graders are scoring below basic,” she added, noting that was a 20-year low.

Rickman said that gap has continued to widen since the pandemic.

“I think schools in particular really need to look at their marginalized and lower-income students and those that are struggling and really focus on how to serve them best,” she said. “Something that we don’t really think about (is) if you figure out how to reach the hardest kids, everybody else is just going to come along.”

The U.S. Education Department criticized scores as a Biden administration policy failure.

“Today’s NAEP results reveal a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears: not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind,” the department said in a statement. “Despite the billions of dollars that the federal government invests in K-12 education annually, and the approximately $190 billion in federal pandemic funds, our education system continues to fail students across the nation.”