American students—pupils, really—continue to decline in reading skills, and their math skills remain far too low.

The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.

And

In math, fourth-grade scores ticked up, while those for the eighth grade were flat. Math scores in both grades remained substantially below prepandemic benchmarks….

There is considerable angst regarding methods for teaching reading.

The results come in the midst of a wave of attention on how to teach students to read. Many school districts and states have emphasized phonics-based instruction, known as the science of reading, and shed other reading methods that focused more on using context to deduce the meaning of words.
Federal officials and researchers say there are no definitive explanations for the latest scores.

The angst is misguided. There’s no reason, for instance, why phonics and context can’t be taught together. They were, in fact, taught if not together then closely sequentially—phonics in first grade, context in second and third grade when I was in grade school. Nor is the Wuhan Virus Situation, often offered as an excuse for these failures, actually involved. The decline in reading and math skills has been going on since long before the virus appeared.

There’s also this bit of gaslighting, from the Denver school system honcho:

Denver Public Schools overhauled its reading curriculum in 2022. Simone Wright, the district’s chief of academics, said the move is making a difference. Denver’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress increased in both grades, though the gains weren’t considered statistically significant.

“Not statistically significant” has a very clear meaning to anyone who can do his sums. That meaning is that it’s not possible to tell whether there were any gains at all, or even whether there was actual decline. Or, maybe not gaslighting so much as she’s as arithmetically illiterate as the pupils in her district.

I offer one definitive solution to the failure—which is a teaching failure, not a student failure (they’re pupils at that age because they’re so young; they remain pupils as they go up the grade ladder because teachers don’t teach them how to be students): stop passing the pupils up the grade ladder until they can read and do math.

This business of social promotion, which itself isn’t entirely on the teachers—parents play a role in “not letting Johnny and Susan fall behind”—is destructive, abusive of the children, and actually accelerates and deepens Johnny’s and Susan’s lag.

Here’s a sample of a high school graduation test from the end of the 19th century. Not only are today’s high schoolers wholly unprepared for such a thing, they have no hope of getting prepared without the basic teachings of reading and math from pre-school on up, and the discipline that comes from teachers (and parents) insisting on actual performance rather than social promotions.

Update: [Sigh]. Added the missing link to the test.