The good news: Washington student scores in math and reading are either on par or better than the national average, even with the hardship of the pandemic.
But in one of the largest snapshots of academic achievement since the school closures of 2020, math performance among Washington eighth-graders appeared to be slipping faster than the mean during an already historic plummet. The scores were released over the weekend.
Between 2019 and 2022, eighth-graders' math scores dropped 10 points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam administered to a representative sample of more than 100,000 fourth- and eighth-graders across the country. It's often described as "the nation's report card." The national drop in math for eighth-graders was eight points, the biggest decline since 1990, the first year of the NAEP math exams.
The NAEP results, which showed virtually no gains in either math or reading for any state, came with an urgent message from federal officials for districts to make the most of the billions of dollars they received in federal aid during the pandemic. Some of that money was explicitly aimed at resolving the academic declines now being seen in the NAEP scores. A state website last updated in September showed Washington districts have yet to claim about 55% of these set-aside dollars for academic recovery.
"If this doesn't have you fired up ... you're in the wrong profession," Miguel Cardona, the U.S. Education secretary, said of the scores during a call with reporters last week. Other officials pointed to the consequences that these losses could pose for students' abilities to get jobs in fields such as math, science and technology.
In reading and in the fourth grade math exam, Washington scores declined to roughly the same degree as other locales. But the most sobering trends were the ones that didn't change at all. In eighth-grade math, for example, the gap in scores between Washington's Hispanic/Latinx and white students was 30 points, almost the same as it was in 2003. In eighth-grade reading, the 29-point gap between Black and white students in Washington hasn't improved since 1998.
NAEP exams are graded on a 500-point scale. The state's overall scores in math and reading were the highest on the West Coast, but somewhat lower than Massachusetts, which is often compared to Washington on education matters. The feds' analysis included some results for individual large school districts, but none of them were in the Northwest.
Results from the state's assessment of students last spring also showed declines. Those scores, however, are not comparable to the results of other states, since each state gets to pick the type of exam they use. In 2019, 48.8% of kids met standards in math, while 59% met standards in English. By spring 2022, those numbers had fallen to 37.7% and 50.7%, respectively.
The decline in scores nationwide is generally associated with family hardship, disruption of academics during school closures and online learning. Some recent research has pointed to lower test scores among students who were learning remotely for longer, such as in Washington and across the West Coast.
At the state level, however, it's hard to tell how much of an effect remote schooling had on learning. State exam results from fall 2021 showed school districts on the west side of the state, where schools were closed the longest, didn't appear to have dramatic differences in their academic declines compared to districts on the east side of the state, where schools reopened as early as fall 2020.
