Try Googling NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the news results reveal such headlines as “Worst Readers Ever” (Thomas B. Fordham Institute), “Scores Keep Falling” (Education Next), “The World’s D Student” (Roll Call), “Drops in Science, Math, and Reading Scores” (NPR), “Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low” (New York Times), “Covid Worsened Long Decline” (The 74), and “Students Score Historic Lows” (Washington Policy Center).
The story is not just pandemic learning loss. Martin West of Harvard’s education department points out, “Achievement in each of the subjects tested—eighth grade science and twelfth grade math and reading—was already trending downward before the pandemic. Twelfth grade reading scores, for example, hit a recent peak in 2009 and fell significantly over the following decade.”
Some may take comfort in the fact that “Colorado students continue to perform better than students in many other states,” as Yesenia Robles reports for Chalkbeat. Yet Colorado, with some of the wealthiest and best-educated parents, automatically should have better-performing students. And, although Colorado students overall showed “slight improvements” from 2022 to 2024, “students who are typically low performing have continued to struggle,” Robles notes.
Colorado test results
The NAEP reports results in four categories: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced. In reading, 65% of Colorado fourth-graders and 74% of eighth-graders scored basic or above. Only 36% of fourth-graders and 35% of eighth-graders scored proficient or above.
In math, 77% of fourth-graders and 65% of eighth-graders scored basic or above. Only 42% of fourth-graders and 33% of eighth-graders scored proficient or above.
In all categories, Asian, white, and “not economically disadvantaged” students dramatically outperformed black, Hispanic, and “economically disadvantaged” students, on average. To take the example of eighth-grade reading, while 53% of Asian students and 44% of white students scored proficient or better, only 29% of black and 19% of Hispanic students did.
We also can look at recent results from the Colorado Measures of Academic Success. It includes results for grades three through eight, but I’ll look only at eighth grade to simplify. 43.9% met or exceeded expectations in English; only 34.7% did in math. Again, Asian, white, and economically advantaged students dramatically outperformed black, Hispanic, and disadvantaged students (here using eligibility for free or reduced lunch as a marker of economic disadvantage).
Stories told to explain the problem
Here’s one story: Maybe phones played a role by distracting students from their education. I think some controls by parents and schools probably are prudent. Yet, as Tyler Cowen suggests, some students use their phones to further their education, so we can’t just reflexively say “phones bad.” Anyway this doesn’t explain the disparities in scores.
The story that conservatives often tell is that schools are overrun with “woke nonsense,” and if schools got back to teaching “the basics,” students would do better. But the “woke nonsense” stories are the ones that grab people’s attention, especially on various social media sites, and they probably do not reflect the typical student’s normal experience in school. So I think the “woke nonsense” story is at most only a small part of the problem. (I’ll get back to “the basics” story.)
The story that the teachers’ unions tell is that schools would do better if only taxpayers gave them more money. When I checked on September 20, the Colorado Education Association (CEA), which basically exists to funnel more tax dollars to its members, claimed on its main web site that because of “restrictive revenue-generating laws in our state, Colorado still ranks at or near the bottom when it comes to starting educator pay, wage competitiveness and per pupil funding.” But World Population Review puts Colorado in the middle for funding.
CEA also claims, “A 2021 report by Northwestern University economists on the relationship between funding and student achievement showed that more funding means consistently better outcomes for students—not just higher test scores and higher graduation rates, but also higher wages as adults.” Unsurprisingly, that is not a remotely accurate summary of the study.
The paper explains that labor economists first examined the issue in the aftermath of the period when schools were officially segregated and some schools were radically underfunded. The paper at hand looks at the “effects of post-1990 school finance reforms” (SFR) motivated largely by equity concerns. The paper found that “ten years of exposure to an SFR raises high school graduation rates by 2.0 percentage points,” with the most gains for Black students, but does not increase college graduation rates. (Funding marginally increases the number of people who attend “some college” and drop out, but that’s not usually a plus for employers!) The paper also shows an income effect, not surprising given that high school graduates tend to earn a lot more money than dropouts. So something important is going on for a small subset of students.
In “The Case Against Education,” economist Bryan Caplan argues that much of the personal value of education comes, not from what schools teach students, but as a way to signal to employers that someone has the intelligence, conscientiousness, and willingness to conform to do a job. Caplan points out that much of what schools teach is low-value so far as the job market goes, and students forget most of what they learn anyway. Even if schools don’t teach students more useful skills, just increasing the graduation rate would get more students successfully into the job market.
But Caplan does not propose a “pure signaling” model. He grants that literacy and numeracy matter and that science and math courses matter a lot for people going into related fields. He also spends a chapter of his book arguing, “We need more vocational education.”
So my best guess is that the Northwestern paper is revealing a combination of better signaling (by increasing graduation rates) and some real gains in learning for some students.
Let’s return to the CMAS results to look at the worst performers. The lowest category of performance listed is “did not yet meet expectations.” This group includes some students who are functionally illiterate. Fewer than 10% of eighth-grade Asian and white students fall into this category for reading; over a quarter of black and Hispanic students do. The numbers get a little worse in math for eighth-grade Asian and White students, but over a third of Black and Hispanic students fall into the lowest category. As I’ve said before, such results are absolutely shameful.
To return to a “back to basics” story, I think on the whole schools jam in way too many low-value classes and activities and too often forget their essential role in teaching kids how to read, write, and work with basic numbers. Mostly we hear discussions about what kids are going to learn about civics or climate change, ignoring that most students quickly forget almost everything they “learn” about such topics anyway.
Priorities matter
Last year the legislature passed a financial literacy graduation requirement. That is bad priority-setting. When a fourth of black and Hispanic students can, at best, barely read, and a third can barely do math, what we need to do is teach kids how to read and do math. A student who can handle words and numbers can learn everything they need to know about financial literacy and anything else from their parents or on their own. A child who cannot read and cannot work with basic numbers cannot become financially literate, whatever class on the subject they might “pass.”
The sensible conclusion to draw from the Northwestern study, in light of Caplan’s findings on signaling, is not that we should continue to throw more money at schools, but that we should use existing resources to teach students how to read and do math. There’s pretty good evidence that high-quality tutoring can substantially help struggling students.
I take Natalie Wexler’s point, that ultimately you teach literacy in the context of reading and writing about specific topics. So I think Caplan undervalues certain topics such as history. Caplan focuses on the fact that people tend to forget the contents of such classes, but if such classes teach people how to read and write and use numbers more effectively, they increase real and valuable skills. So schools should turn every class into an opportunity for students to become better readers, writers, and (where relevant) mathematicians, and schools should give kids freer rein to explore topics of interest to them rather than of interest to teachers, legislators, or boards of education. Government has “standardized” education practically to death, and it’s no wonder that most students regard school as a boring slog.
More choice can’t hurt
Congratulations to D’Evelyn Junior/Senior High School, a charter, for ranking 53rd nationally, Colorado’s only school in the top-100, according to US News and World Report. Meanwhile, Denver Public Schools doesn’t have a school in the top-200, Westword reports.
Another story conservatives want to tell is that school choice is good, we need more of it, and when parents have more choice they send their kids to better schools and incentivize schools to improve. I think there’s something to that story. But I’m also somewhat sympathetic to the criticism that, where charter schools succeed, they do so partly by attracting the better students, not only by making students better. Caplan also raises the concern that vouchers further entrench the problem of spending resources on signaling rather than on skill-building.
D’Evelyn Junior High students did relatively well on the CMAS, with fewer than 3% scoring in the lowest category, three-fourths of students meeting or exceeding expectations in English, and two-thirds doing so in math (all grades). “D’Evelyn High School has a 97 percent graduation rate, . . . and 90 percent passed at least one AP exam” last year, Westword reports.
For the most part, these are not kids struggling with basic literacy; these are kids prepping for college. Giving them a course in financial literacy certainly isn’t going to hurt them, but then I could say the same about a course in underwater basket weaving, gender studies, or the films of Harry Potter.
Whatever stories you tell about what works in education, I hope people of broad ideological backgrounds can agree that Colorado schools fail horribly insofar as some students do not gain basic literacy and numeracy, and we ought to fix that.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
