Plummeting U.S. test scores aren’t a red state vs. blue state thing

It turns out that all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.
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Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released Monday, show that the pandemic ushered in a falling tide that lowered all boats. Scores for fourth-graders and eighth-graders in reading declined markedly — and, in math, showed the biggest drop since testing began in 1990 — regardless of what ambitious politicians said or did.

Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, made a big show of reopening their states’ schools in the fall of 2020, with DeSantis going so far as to threaten to withhold funding from school districts that did not comply. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, on the other hand, moved more slowly, conditioning the return to in-person instruction on the level of covid-19 infection in a given county.

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