Our nation’s schools are failing to teach our children to read, and a new report shows that the learning loss began more than a decade ago, well before COVID-19. Fortunately, the same report found that some districts have reversed the decline through tried-and-true teaching methods. Now we need the political will to implement those reforms nationally.The Education Scorecard, issued by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, uses data from the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress to track educational achievement at the school-district level going back decades.While it is well known that students across the country suffered severe learning loss because of COVID shutdowns, the Education Scorecard reports that the learning recession actually began in 2013 and, in reading, accelerated before the pandemic. Specifically, the report found that the average annual loss in reading between 2017 and 2019 was just as large as the loss sustained during COVID and the subsequent shutdowns from 2019 to 2022.
The Education Scorecard blames the pre-COVID slide in reading scores on the dismantling of test-based accountability that had been in place for decades. Pushed at the federal level by President George W. Bush and initially embraced by President Barack Obama, standardized testing forced school districts to confront which schools were properly teaching students and which were not. As a direct result of this accountability, reading skills improved dramatically during this era, and racial disparities shrank.
