A new report card for the American public school system has arrived, and the results aren’t good. The news is especially dire for two of the chief influences on US education: social-justice pedagogy and tech-centred instruction.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered to a sample of students in American grades 4, 8, and 12 to track student performance in reading, math, and other areas. New NAEP data published this week shows a significant drop in the performance of high-school seniors since 2019 in both reading and maths. Long-term trends show an even bigger fall-off. Shockingly, average reading scores are almost 10 points lower than they were in 1992.

Parsing the data reveals an even more concerning trend. This decline in scores is not evenly distributed but is instead concentrated among lower-performing students. The top 10% of students actually saw their reading scores increase by a couple of points between 1992 and 2024 (even if they slipped a few points between 2015 and today). Further down the scale, however, it’s an academic bloodbath. Students in the 25th and 10th percentiles saw their reading scores collapse by 16 and 25 points respectively.

These findings mean that the gap between the lowest 10% of students and the top 10% has grown by over 30% over the last three or so decades. Mathematics shows a similar trend, though the declines aren’t quite as dramatic.

The pandemic turbocharged two educational approaches already regnant in US educational policy. Much has already been written about the incorporation of tech into learning, but the post-2020 period also saw the infusion of the “equity” agenda into America’s classrooms. Not only have progressive activists tried to eliminate tracking based on academic performance from public schools; they have also worked in tandem with both state and federal policymakers to push for “restorative justice” approaches — which prioritise “mediation” meetings and cooperation between students and teachers — to school discipline that make it harder to remove disruptive students from the classroom.

This approach is particularly pervasive in blue cities — and it comes with deleterious consequences. For example, in one New York elementary school a student who allegedly stabbed a staff member with a pencil and threatened to kill other students was nevertheless allowed to stay enrolled in that class, despite the continued concerns of other parents. This isn’t a one-off, either: according to recent New York Times calculations, there are now thousands more “school safety incidents” in Big Apple public schools compared to 2018.

If these developments were meant to unlock student potential and redress longstanding academic disparities, they failed. Indeed, the latest NAEP scores show how this equity revolution has led to deeply inequitable results by widening certain achievement gaps. Just like unrest in the streets disproportionately harms the vulnerable, disorder in the classroom especially hurts students who are academically struggling. It’s harder to concentrate on a difficult task when violence could break out at any moment or when everyone around you is playing video games on their phones.

These test results have already provided more fodder for the Trump administration’s campaign of educational disruption. Adjusted for inflation, per-pupil spending on public education has continued to grow, so the issue is not one of funding. Policies on technology, school discipline and core instruction need reform.

If left unchecked, educational polarisation could plant the seeds of even greater instability for generations to come. A whole swathe of students risk emerging with shaky academic foundations and a diminished capacity for critical reasoning — the very skills needed to participate in democracy and steer their own lives. Failing public schools wouldn’t just leave them unprepared; they could also fuel a deeper mistrust of American institutions themselves, with consequences that ripple far beyond the classroom.

One of the principal charges of the American public education system has been to promote social and economic integration by providing a common backstop of skills, such as literacy, and knowledge. An educational paradigm in which the top 20% of students are treading water while the bottom half fall behind runs directly counter to that mission. Along with the many other institutions being tested at the moment, America’s public schools need to rise to the challenge of reform. Making public schools serve the public means ensuring that students of a wide range of abilities have access to a safe and rigorous learning environment.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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