1.4 million students, lower test scores, and a 34% increase in spending. What is going on with public education?
by Shaun Kenney
Recent numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) offer a gripping overview of the state of public education in America. Fewer children to teach, lower test scores, and a massive infusion of federal cash to hire more teachers and administrators is evaporating post-pandemic — leaving state and local governments in the lurch.
Tosin Akintola over at Reason outlines the results:
Still, more money hasn’t led to better student outcomes. At each grade level and across subject areas, there’s a decline in current achievement when compared to student benchmarks from 2019. In 2024, the most recent data available, only 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders were reading at or above a basic level, the lowest performance tier used by the National Center for Education Statistics.
It doesn’t get better as students age, with just 68 percent of high school seniors reading at or above a basic level.
Of course, this is a very high gloss look. Pushing $190 billion in temporary relief during a pandemic perhaps served to highlight problems that have been cropping up in classrooms since the introduction of the smartphone. The ubiquity of artificial intelligence has introduced a degree of pragmatism in students conditioned to produced test results rather than engage in deep learning — again, another factor not easily measured by either the NCES or NAEP.
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