During the last week of October, nationwide test scores revealed a downward trend that’s concerning to many education officials, perhaps most notably, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), commonly referred to as the National Report Card, has been used annually since the early 1990s as a tool to measure the current state of America’s education system. Roughly 600,000 students in grades 4 and 8 are tested from every state and Washington, D.C.

In this year’s report, only D.C and Mississippi saw substantial score improvements for both reading and math. Nationwide, reading scores fell with 4th-grade scores declining in 17 states and 8th-grade scores declining in 38. Math saw more mixed results, with certain states increasing slightly, and others dropping by just as much, leading to a mostly stagnant average. The report also revealed that two-thirds of American students can’t read at a proficient level, and declines occurred in both high and low achieving students. These results are the continuation of a 2-year downward trend and generally stagnant progress that experts are concerned about overall. Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), told Lauren Camera of US News and World Report that the 3 point drop in 8th graders’ results is “a very meaningful decline.”

From the 1990s to 2015, U.S. students made considerable progress with 4th graders improving 27 points in math and 6 in reading, and 8th graders improving 19 points in math and 5 in reading, during that time period according to Camera. After 2015, however, scores either declined or stayed stagnant.
“The results are, frankly, devastating. This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” says Donald Trump-appointed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a press release, a sentiment echoed by many members of NCES. She adds that this stagnation puts U.S students at a growing disadvantage on the world stage.
The NAEP website explicitly cautions against making causal assumptions, adding that “inferences related to student group performance or to the effectiveness of public and nonpublic schools…should take into consideration the many socioeconomic and educational factors that may also have an impact on performance,” but that didn’t stop people from speculating. In her speech at the National Press Club in D.C., DeVos notes the climbing cost of per-pupil spending and suggests that the funding has gone not to the students but to administrators and the many levels of “bureaucracy” within the school system. Education Reporter Valerie Strauss thinks DeVos and others are misinterpreting these results, making them a bigger deal than they are. In her Washington Post article, she proposes the idea that since students aren’t affected by their scores on these tests, they don’t have any incentive to do well.

Conversely, Joy Pullmann, former teacher and current executive editor at the conservative newspaper The Federalist, attributes the low scores to the failure of the Obama-era education initiative Common Core, while Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, attributes them to a lack of counseling resources and emotional support for traumatized students.
Unsurprisingly, this trend of underachieving test scores isn’t just present in elementary and middle school. The data from the 2018 ACT scores also presented a notable statistic: According to an article from the educational organization EdWeek, only 40% of students that took the test were able to meet the benchmark for college readiness, a 7 point decrease from 2012.

Currently, to try to solve this growing problem, DeVos is proposing more school choice policies and less national involvement in the school system, which she believes is better handled by the states.