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Feeling “Bad At Math” Passes From Parents To Children
America’s problems with math are multigenerational
Last week we got bad news about how COVID affected children in school. The results came out for the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress — a standardized test given to fourth and eighth graders, of both math and reading. The federal government has been doing this test since the 1990s; it’s sometimes called “the nation’s report card”.
The new report card wasn’t great. Reading scores declined in about half the states; none showed a significant improvement.
But math was the real nightmare. Under COVID, kids really collapsed in math. As Sarah Mervosh and Ashley Wu wrote in the New York Times …
… math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019.
Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent. [snip]
In eighth-grade math, the average score fell in all but one state. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia experienced double-digit drops, including higher-performing states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and lower-performing states like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Utah was the only state where the eighth-grade math declines were not deemed statistically significant.
What caused such terrible declines in math? Well, COVID, obviously. But the specific mechanisms of how the pandemic hurt kids isn’t as clear as one might expect. You might figure that whichever state kept its schools closed the longest did the worst, but that isn’t quite what happened. Some states that reopened schools more quickly, like Texas, crashed in math just as bad as the national average. On top of school closings, COVID presented a lot of other shocks to kids’ systems, including the anxiety and trauma of having family and community members fall seriously ill or die. Income and wealth heavily affect these outcomes, too, as you might expect.
But the Times writers made another offhand note that’s really illuminating, though:
Reading was less affected, perhaps, in part…
