U.S. Student Test Scores Lower Than Decade Ago Report Says

A report released Wednesday found that students in U.S. schools are performing worse than their peers a decade ago. The decline is not entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the document. The Education Scorecard, a joint initiative from researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and Dartmouth College, analyzed students’ reading and math scores in grades 3 through 8 from over 100 school districts across the country from 2009 to 2025.

The data showed that test scores, especially in reading, started declining around 2013. Reading scores from 2017 to 2019, before the pandemic, were already dropping and matched the levels recorded during the pandemic years of 2019 to 2022. Eighth-graders’ reading scores reached their lowest point in 2025, matching levels last seen in 1990.

“Between 2013 and 2015, the rate of improvement became negative in mathematics and was essentially zero in reading. Although the pandemic seemed to hasten the decline in math, the annual rate of decline in reading was similar in the period before the pandemic (2017–19), during the pandemic (2019–22), and after the pandemic (2022–24),” the report stated.

Kane, an author of the report and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, pointed to social media and a lack of testing as two factors that led to what he described as a learning recession. "The 'learning recession' started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children's lives," Kane said in a statement released with the report.

The report said the ending of the No Child Left Behind federal law in 2015 and the rise of screen and social media use among students contributed to the performance decline. The law, enacted in 2002, required schools to report students' academic progress.