American Students Lose Ground in Reading and Math

American K-12 education keeps getting worse, new data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University suggests. Students’ test scores in reading and math have been falling for more than a decade.

• Reading scores in 2025 were about 0.6 grade levels lower than in 2015. Math scores were about 0.4 grade levels lower. This means a typical student today is roughly six months behind in reading and four months behind in math where students were a decade ago.

Scores rose steadily from 1990 to 2013. Then American students entered what experts call a “learning recession.” Progress stopped, then began to drop. The covid-19 pandemic accelerated the downturn in math scores, while reading scores continued their steady declines.

Experts point to two main causes for the long decline: the end of strong test-based accountability programs from the 1990s and 2000s, and the explosion of social media use among teens.

• Social media shortens attention spans, hurts sleep, increases anxiety, and reduces the amount of reading students do outside of school. Heavy social media users tend to be the lowest-performing students.

This is a serious problem. Reading and math skills are especially important for building logic and critical thinking, not only for employment but for building an intelligent and virtuous population. They strengthen a person’s ability to solve problems and understand the world around him.

“I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train,” English political philosopher John Locke wrote; “not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that, having got the way of reasoning which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they shall have occasion.”

The rise of social media is especially worrying. It may leave America with a whole generation that must effectively rely on others to think for them. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Charles Yancey in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”