America’s public school students are drowning.
After nearly three decades of slow but steady increases in reading achievement, the scores of our fourth and eighth graders stagnated after 2015 and have fallen precipitously since 2019 for all but the highest performers.
Though the pandemic caused immediate and severe learning loss, reading scores have continued to erode even as the country passed the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown. Nationally, as of 2024, fourth and eighth graders are back to where they started at the advent of the reading assessment.
In simple terms, the share of fourth graders falling below the “basic” level of literacy has risen to 40%.3 Fewer than one-third of U.S. eighth graders can read at grade level. The picture is similarly bleak in math — stagnation just prior to the pandemic, followed by significant declines since, with the deepest drops among the lowest-performing students. The results in all grades and subjects show a widening gap between the highest and lowest performers, all while test scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, despite the Biden administration’s infusion of $190 billion in federal pandemic relief.
These results from the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, spawned alarming headlines upon their release in January 2025: “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” blasted the New York Times; “Kids’ Reading and Math Skills Are Worsening, New Test Scores Reveal. What’s Going On?” USA Today fretted. The dire data posed no mystery to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which summed up the situation bluntly: “America’s Schools Keep Flunking.”
American parents share the conclusion of the Journal’s ed board about the state of public schooling. August 2024 public opinion polling from Gallup shows satisfaction with education remains among the lowest it has been this century, with three in ten parents somewhat or completely dissatisfied with their child’s education and more than half of the wider public feeling the same.
A January 2025 Gallup survey about the general mood of the nation from two weeks before the recent NAEP release shows even lower satisfaction with public schools, with seven in ten respondents reporting dissatisfaction.
Despite this crisis, the consensus that policymakers and advocates reached in the early 2000s about the importance and urgency of improving educational outcomes has long since disintegrated, torn apart by the social controversies that now dominate education rather than ideas about how to improve teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is attempting to eviscerate, if not shut down, the U.S. Department of Education and to redirect federal education spending from public to private schools.
Democrats opened the door to these attacks by abandoning the Clinton-Obama legacy of school reform and lining up behind teachers’ unions defending the K-12 status quo. As a result, they’ve forfeited their party’s historical advantage on educational issues. But if Democrats can no longer claim the mantle of the party of education, neither can Republicans, who have abdicated responsibility for the majority of the nation’s schoolchildren by focusing on private school choice to the exclusion of nearly everything else.13 Ninety percent of American children attend public schools, and yet neither party is speaking to them or their families.
The consequences for the country and our children of continued inaction are severe. “Looking at this data, it’s clear that we’re in enormous risk of losing an entire generation of learners unless we show some focus and leadership,” Jane Swift, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, told a reporter after the NAEP scores became public. In short, we’ve arrived at another “Nation
at Risk” moment, but this time, U.S. political and business leaders aren’t stepping forward to galvanize national action to fix our chronically underperforming public schools. Senator Michael Bennet was pointed in a recent interview about the vacuum of national attention and leadership, stating, “…We’ve abandoned our aspirations for our kids when it comes to their education, period. We can’t tolerate a system that creates the kind of outcomes we’re seeing. …We have a national interest in the fact that our reading scores are below where they were three decades ago. We have a national interest in the fact that our kids feel like the system we have — whether it’s K-12, higher education, or workforce development — is not preparing them to succeed in this economy.”
We couldn’t agree more. The country urgently needs a new vision that refocuses public schools on their core academic mission, ends the retreat from rigor and merit, increases opportunity for learners of all backgrounds, expands parental choice of public schools, closes achievement gaps, and moves to a post-bureaucratic system of autonomous and accountable public schools designed for today’s children.
