America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education.

It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. 

• At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. 
• What exactly went wrong? 

The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it...

• Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea...
• Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. 
• In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990...