Mississippi can take some satisfaction in that it generally didn’t experience as large a decline as the rest of the nation in students’ academic achievement during the pandemic.
But “some” is the operative word. There’s also a lot to be dissatisfied with, especially the fact that whatever gains the state has made in students’ early years appear to be transitory, disappearing before they start high school.
The big national story this week is that the newly released “nation’s report card” confirmed what most everyone had anticipated: that the COVID-19 pandemic, with its constant disruptions and the shift to remote learning, has caused a serious decline in how much students learned.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is usually given every other year to a statistically valid sampling of 4th and 8th graders in every state. Because of the pandemic, the 2022 reading and math tests were the first given since 2019. They provide an objective measure of the consequences of abandoning in-person instruction for up to a year in some places. For all of teachers’ and parents’ best efforts, and despite all the technology that made remote learning feasible, it was an educational disaster, as every region of the country suffered significant learning setbacks.
Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels, and math scores saw their largest decreases in the history of the NAEP test, which began in 1969. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in average test scores, and some districts experienced the equivalent of an entire lost year of learning.
Given that grim national report, Mississippi education officials were feeling relatively buoyant that the state’s recent historic gains in fourth-grade reading largely held. Last spring 31% of students who were tested scored proficient or better, compared to 32% in 2019. That keeps the state on par with the national average.
Eighth grade scores remain, though, a huge concern. The ground that Mississippi lost in both reading and math at that grade level put the state back to where it was in 2011, with only about a fifth of students proficient in either subject. Even with the poor showing nationwide, Mississippi eighth graders in both subjects are still almost a year behind their national peers.
Why have the notable gains Mississippi has achieved in fourth grade during the past decade not carried over into students’ later years? That’s the question the state’s public education leaders need to be asking themselves.
It is wonderful to see progress in the early years of a child’s education, when students learn to read and acquire the other basic building blocks of learning. But if that progress is lost in subsequent years of schooling, how much has really been gained?
The ultimate measure of an educational system’s success is the final product upon graduation from high school. If the majority of those coming out of high school are still ill-equipped for college or for higher-skilled jobs in the workplace, then the education system is not doing the job.
The educational losses from the pandemic are serious but possibly short-lived. The losses as students age through the system, though, are systemic and longstanding.
Mississippi should maybe be more worried about the latter.
