My best successes came on the heels of failures (Barbara Corcoran)

Photo by Alex Zamora on Unsplash

A recent report in Morning Brew indicated that reading and maths scores among high school students in the U.S. have dropped to their lowest levels in 20 years, per new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The downwards trend was evident before covid-19 happened, but it's continued apace since then.

The following are some excerpts from the news article discussing this situation:

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”

“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. “We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic.”

While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school.

This rings true for New Zealand as well. Anecdotally, this trend has been apparent to me and my English department colleagues for a while. Interesting that it is now backed up by research.

As I've written about recently, I've noticed, for the first time, students flat giving up. Because the task seems impossible, they don't believe in themselves. Their absence rate is also a real factor. 

This is a real worry, and I think school leaders need to be proactive now to consider courses wherein students can gain some confidence via success.

To paraphrase Soldner from above: we need to act now in a concerted and focused way to arrest this decline. 

Or else...