Today’s 9-year-olds are significantly better readers than 9-year-olds were a half-century ago. Today’s 13-year-olds are not.
That’s the troubling lesson from the latest long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results suggest that America has made real progress helping young children build foundational skills – the problem is that too many students stop building on those gains as they move into adolescence.
Since the 1970s, the NAEP’s long-term trend test has looked at reading and math performance among American 9- and 13-year-olds. The idea is straightforward and age-appropriate, dealing with fundamental skills. Can a child find the average of three numbers? Can they find the main idea in a story passage?
On the one hand, the latest batch of NAEP long-term national data shows 9-year-olds are making progress in reading and math compared to 2022, a welcome sign showing our youngest learners are on the right track.
Not so for 13-year-olds. Only the highest-performing adolescent readers outperform their peers from the 1970s. Most other students show little measurable change.