The latest Nation’s Report Card shows eighth-graders’ scores in U.S. history and geography declining since 2014, results Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday called “stark and inexcusable.”
Civics scores on the 2018 assessments were the same as in the last round of tests four years earlier, the newly released results show.
The assessments, given for the first time digitally on tablets instead of paper, were administered to 42,700 eighth-grade students in 780 public and private schools across the nation.
Also troubling, administrators said, was that lower-performing students lost more ground than middle- and higher-performing students, mirroring a pattern seen in recent reading and math scores. The problem is likely to be made worse by the loss of class time caused by the coronavirus, which is expected to have a greater impact on lower-performing students.
The pattern “should motivate us all to address the factors behind these declines for struggling students,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board.