When the latest national achievement scores come out, people want to look at the change since the last time. Are things going up or down?
But that short-term focus on the averages loses sight of what’s happening at the tails — the top performers and the weakest — and how things have evolved over longer periods of time.
To zoom out, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to build the time-lapse tools below.
The first one shows you the evolution of 12th grade math scores. This particular test was first administered in 2005 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the 2024 scores came out in September, The 74 wrote about the declines overall and for the lowest-performing students.
Distribution of 12th Grade Math Scores
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- 2005
- 2009
- 2013
- 2015
- 2019
- 2024
But going even deeper now, we borrowed a methodology from Daniel McGrath, a former associate commissioner for assessments at the National Center for Education Statistics, to go even deeper and show how achievement scores have shifted over time.
The graphs represent the distribution of student performance, starting with 2005. In an ideal world, we’d want to see the entire curve shift to the right as scores rise.
And that’s exactly what we do see from 2005 to 2009, when the average score rose by three points, and scores rose across the performance distribution. That is, there were slightly fewer kids scoring at the lowest levels and slightly more kids scoring at higher levels.
From 2009 to 2013, the average rose by less than a point, but change was still positive, although less noticeably so. There was some movement from the lower-performing ranges to the middle of the curve, but there was not much movement at the top.
By 2015, the curve began shifting to the left —, in the wrong direction. This should have been the first warning sign on declining student achievement.
Between 2015 and 2019, the slide continued. In those years, the decline was mostly about the middle of the performance distribution shrinking. Meanwhile, the extreme tails of the performance distribution were starting to grow.
And then the pandemic hit, schools closed, and the performance distribution as a whole shifted even further to the left. In 2024, we see a clear gap between the original distribution in 2005 versus what we have today, with and there are a lot more kids falling into the lower performance bands.
The exception is students at the very, very top, who have been growing in number over time. Overall, the range between the strongest and weakest performers distribution on 12th grade math performance is now wider than it has been in at least the last two decades.
The reading scores for 12th graders are even more depressing. They haven’t gotten as much attention as the math scores, perhaps because the averages scores haven’t followed as dramatic of an up-and-down rollercoaster as the math scores have followed.
Distribution of 12th Grade Reading Scores
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- ’92
- ’94
- ’96
- ’98
- ’02
- ’05
- ’09
- ’13
- ’15
- ’19
- ’24
The 12th grade reading test results scores go back even further in time, to 1992, and they show a much larger spread over time than what we see in the math scores.
The spread shows up almost immediately, with fewer students scoring in the middle of the distribution and more students at the bottom end.
We saw some improvements from 1994 to 1998, and, in terms of the average 12th grader, 1998 was the all-time peak in reading scores.
12th grade reading scores were starting to fall by 2002.
They fell again in 2005, especially in the middle of the performance spectrum.
Scores bounced up in 2009, but those were short-lived.
In 2013 the gains flatlined…
…and things got progressively worse in 2015…
..before falling to a new low in 2024.
The year-to-year changes have masked just how much things have shifted over the long term. Today, our performance curve looks flatter than ever — we do have a few more high scorers, but we have a lot more low performers.
These graphs show the scores of 12th graders in math and reading, but it’s likely that other grades and subjects would show similar patterns. It’s not just that average scores have declined across a wide range of tests, grades and subjects; we also have a lot more low-performing students than we did in the past.
While the data presented here are at the national level, any state, district or school leader could see how things are changing in their community. At the classroom or school level, increased variability in student performance makes it harder for teachers to personalize their instruction and for school leaders to design systemwide supports. To get things back on track, policymakers should pay special attention to how their lowest-performing students are faring.
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