Why Are US Students at the Bottom Struggling So Much?

I’ve written about this topic several times and the general conclusion is that remote learning during the pandemic was terrible for nearly all kids but especially for those near the bottom, the ones who benefitted most from personal attention from teachers.

However, this article suggests there has to be more to the story because of one simple fact. The same student’s scores started declining about five years before the pandemic hit. So the pandemic definitely made things much worse, but something was going on with these same kids even before that. Here’s the chart that is really the key to the story.

As you can see, all students had trouble in math in 2020 but top scoring kids have bounced back while lower performing kids have not. Also, it’s clear that math scores of the kids near the bottom started dropping after 2013 (2015 for reading), long before the pandemic hit. So what is going on here? And does that prior decline help explain why some kids haven’t bounced back after the pandemic, i.e. they were struggling before and they’re still struggling now.

“Whatever is happening to the lower performers is still happening,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, who has tracked the trend.

Researchers point to a number of educational and societal changes over the past decade, including a retrenchment in school accountability, the lasting effects of the Great Recession and the rise of smartphones, which has coincided with worsening cognitive abilities even among adults since the early 2010s.

The article considers each of those possibilities starting with immigration, which brought in a lot of non-English speakers over the past few years. However that possibility is complicated by the fact that the declines don’t seem to track with English proficiency.

For example, in eighth grade math, the bottom 10 percent of proficient English speakers lost more ground than the lowest-scoring English learners, Mr. Aldeman found.

Another possibility is smart phones and the distraction these create. The timeline does seem to match roughly with the one that Jonathan Haidt has been writing about for the last couple years.

It’s not entirely clear why smartphone use would have a greater effect on low performers. But smartphones also take time away from other activities. Children (and adults) are reading fewer books than in the past, with low-scoring students being the least likely to read recreationally.

The zillions of hours that kids spend on TikTok everyday have to come from somewhere. Reading suffers. Homework probably suffers. Of course teens have always had plenty of distrations but nothing like social media which is literally designed to hold their attention as long as possible. This may be another good argument for keeping cell phones away from young kids and off entirely while at school.

Finally, there’s another possibility which has to do with testing and George W. Bush.

One possible explanation is the end of No Child Left Behind, the contentious school accountability law President George W. Bush signed in 2002…

By the early 2010s, states had gotten waivers from the law, and in 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act returned power to the states, which in many cases led to more relaxed accountability…

“When we had meaningful accountability at the state and local level, kids were doing better,” said Margaret Spellings, Mr. Bush’s education secretary from 2005 to 2009. “When we stopped doing that, we went the wrong direction.”

That’s certainly an interesting possibility as it points to failures by adults, specifically teachers and administrators who didn’t like the national accountability and wanted out. But maybe they needed that accountability and without it kids weren’t getting the same level of instruction.

Finally, it’s also possible that it’s not one thing but a combination of many. That’s how the real world usually works. Maybe smart phones are a fraction of the problem as they are more appealing to low performing kids who weren’t interested in school to start with. And on top of that you have teachers who are suddenly coasting a bit because the pressure of constant testing is relaxed.

But the bottom line is that things weren’t going well and then we dropped the remote learning bomb on these same kids. Suddenly all they had was their phones and expectations from teachers went to zero in many places. In other words, all of the problems we were already dealing with went to the maximum setting, making everything worse.

We’ve already spent a metric ton of federal money trying to bring test scores back from their pandemic lows, but as you can see from the chart above it hasn’t worked. The kids at the bottom are still headed further down. We’re probably going to have to make some changes to things we were doing pre-pandemic if we want to change that trend.