United States | Mountains to climb

America risks fumbling its chance to help schoolchildren catch up

Enormous extra funding is not all being well spent

A third-grade student reads to the rest of her class at Beecher Hills Elementary School on Friday, Aug. 19, 2022, in Atlanta. Third-graders are at a particularly delicate moment. This is the year when they must master reading or risk school failure. Everything after third grade will require reading comprehension to learn math, social studies and science. Students who don’t read fluently by the end of third grade are more likely to struggle in the future, and even drop out, studies show. (AP Photo/Ron Harris)

Oct 24th 2022

Having struggled through some of the rich-world’s longest school closures, America’s pupils have fallen far behind. Nationally representative data released by the government on October 24th show that, since the start of the pandemic, scores in reading and maths have dropped back to levels of 20 years ago (see chart). Numeracy has suffered its biggest decline since comparable testing began in the early 1990s. Miguel Cardona, President Joe Biden’s education secretary, told journalists the numbers were “appalling and unacceptable”. How America responds, he said, will affect its “standing in the world”.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Mountains to climb”