The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are out, and as Colleen Hroncich has discussed, they are not good, with record-low performance for twelfth graders, the “final products” of our K‑12 system. Importantly, standardized tests are limited instruments and are not the only important measures of how our system is performing. Our anxiety should also be tempered because these are the first post-COVID-19 results for these particular subject-grade combinations; hence, we are at least somewhat seeing a pandemic effect. Other recent NAEP results include more than one post-COVID-19 year, and seeing declines from one post-COVID-19 year to another would suggest we are not ameliorating the pandemic’s effects. For these, we do not know if things have improved from, say, 2022 to 2024.
Considering the important COVID-19 and standardized testing provisos, these results add another year to the achievement trend we have for twelfth graders and can help us learn a bit more about how productive our K‑12 system is.
The first chart depicts changes in the share of twelfth-grade students hitting “proficient” from the baseline years of 1992 for reading and 2005 for math. It also shows the percentage change in inflation-adjusted spending per pupil from the 1992 baseline. The results are not good: real spending rose more than 50 percent, while the share of students proficient in reading dropped 6 percentage points—from 40 percent in 1992 to only 34 percent in 2024—and in math fell 1 percentage point, from 23 percent in 2005 to 22 percent in 2024.
The second chart adds two more important parts of the story. The orange line is the percentage change in inflation-adjusted federal K‑12 spending per pupil since 1992. This matters because the federal role in education is being heavily debated right now. It suggests that federal spending—which spikes with “relief” during the Great Recession and COVID-19—does not help, at least in the aggregate. Of course, one could argue that matters would be even worse without the federal money. This is where the darker gray line—inflation-adjusted GDP per capita—comes in.
GDP has risen steadily, with just a couple of minor dips. Increasing material well-being, other things equal, should push educational outcomes up. At the very least, this suggests that rising federal and overall education spending have not simply been balancing out declining well-being. Either money is not a positive force on NAEP scores, or some other variables are negating increasing spending, and then some.
Standardized test scores are not everything. But they are something, and to the extent they tell us how well our K‑12 system is working, we have clearly been losing bang for our bucks.