“It’s very encouraging,” he said. “Although their performance is below average, [they] They have an upward trend.”
One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report notes, is the age of the students. They were 4 years old when the pandemic began in 2020 and did not start school until most places returned to full-time in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key literacy and math lessons in the early years of elementary school.
These students gave researchers hope about the nation’s potential to recover some of the decline. that started long before COVID-19.
2. But 13-year-olds are suffering.
The report presents a less optimistic picture of 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students did not show significant improvements in reading or math.
Reading scores remain on average below where they were at the start of the pandemic, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, economically disadvantaged students and suburban students.
Reading scores on this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance on the first test administered in 1971.
“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises big questions and should serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a news conference. Your organization establishes policies related to NAEP.
For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020 they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnation in performance may be one of the consequences.
3. Fewer students than ever read for pleasure.
At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a declining number of children.
In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported that they read daily for fun. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A much larger share of 9-year-olds (37%) reported that they read for fun every day, but that is far lower than decades earlier.
4. 13-year-olds’ math progress is erased.
From 1978 to 2012, average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. Climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those achievements have been erased.
The lowest achieving students now show no improvement compared to their 1978 math test results.
“As a nation, we need to pay more attention to the high school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It will take a lot of collective work, but we have seen progress before and it is possible to see it again.”
5. This is the last we will see of the long-term trends report for a while.
This is the first NAEP long-term trends report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Department of Education in 2025. Those cuts included the dismissal of more than half of the workers of the Institute of Education Sciencesthe arm of the department charged with measuring student performance and monitoring and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.
After those cuts, the department also canceled about a dozen national and state assessments of student progress until 2032, one of them being the next version of these tests. (Since then, Plans have been announced. to restore some of those exams.)
Still, students will not see these questions again. until 2033.
