The US Education Department, which the Trump administration is actively attempting to dismantle, has released the latest math and reading test scores for American high-school seniors — and they’re an absolute disaster.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the scores have hit an all-time low, even by America’s historically underwhelming standards. It’s a worrying sign that the rapid rise of technologies like AI — combined with other likely factors, like the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic — have massively disrupted young people successfully learning the skills they need to succeed.
However, experts warn that drawing any definitive conclusions remains difficult, considering the many factors at play.
The results are from of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests tens of thousands of students every year.
And the latest results are damning: between 2019 and 2024, the share of 12th-graders who were proficient in math and reading fell by a full two percent, to just 35 percent in reading and 22 percent in math. Only one in five students could draw a conclusion from a persuasive essay, and only 60 percent of students could deduce the population of a geographic area after being given the size and density.
“Students are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the board that oversaw the tests, told the WSJ. “This is happening at a time when rapid advancements in technology and society demand more of future workers and citizens, not less.”
Harvard Graduate School of Education academic dean Martin West told the newspaper that “we should be thinking of possible explanations that transcend national boundaries,” warning that there still isn’t a “smoking gun” to explain the latest figures, such as smartphone use or social media.
As the WSJ notes, it’s also possible that rising high-school graduation rates may be obscuring things, since more lower-performing students are taking the tests as a result.
Nonetheless, experts have warned that other technologies like AI could end up having devastating consequences for an entire generation of students, who have adopted tools like OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT in a big way. That’s despite glaring shortcomings of the tech such as frequent hallucinations.
Even educators are starting to use AI to grade their students’ work, setting up a grim feedback loop in which kids aren’t learning critical thinking skills in class.
In other words, while we’re only beginning to understand why learning skills are continuing to drop among American students, there’s a confluence of factors that could mean things are poised to get even worse.
Meanwhile, education secretary Linda McMahon argued that math and reading scores among high school students hitting an all-time low was an argument for shutting the Education Department, not against.
“President Trump and I are committed to returning control of education to the states so they can innovate,” she said in a statement.
Former education secretary Margaret Spellings, who served under president George W. Bush, has accused the Trump administration of using plans to abolish the department to distract “from our most urgent priority of better preparing our students.”
“This is not the right moment to talk about closing the Department of Education,” she said in a statement of her own. “When your house is on fire you don’t talk about making renovations.”
More on education: Creepy AI Will Look Up a Teacher’s Info to Predict What Grade They’ll Give a Paper
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