September 2022

This summer felt like being trapped in a Groundhog Day movie— waking up to repeat the same blame-game politics day after day. Republicans blamed Democrat gubernatorial candidate and current Governor Laura Kelly for unpopular COVID policies.

The just-released NAEP report indicates that the U.S. response to the pandemic resulted in the performance of 9-year olds’ math abilities dropping to levels of two decades ago. The decline in reading was the worst in three decades. It affected the poorer-performing students worse, where “students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the decrease of students in the 90th percentile.” These National Assessment of Educational Progress tests have been tracking student achievement in grades 4, 8, and 12 since 1970. Academic areas evaluated include mathematics, reading, writing, U.S. history, geography and other areas. This rapid and severe decline in student performance and knowledge during the two and a half years of pandemic schooling in America, much of it conducted online, will not be reflected in students’ grades. Grade inflation was already institutionalized across most states by policies that drove grade point averages (GPAs) up while scores on another common assessment, the ACT, continued to fall. The pandemic dramatically accelerated this grade inflation while ACT scores, and now the NAEP, show that learning has dramatically fallen. —Thus, higher grades for much less learned.