April 22, 2026
Grades fall, comments brawl
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics
Blame game explodes: COVID, screens, or a long slow slide
TLDR: Thirteen-year-olds fell again—down 4 in reading and 9 in math since 2019–20. Comments erupted into a blame battle: pandemic learning loss vs long-running decline vs screen time, with one user noting COVID barely appears in the report and another saying the numbers now look like the ’80s.
Thirteen-year-olds just flunked the vibes check: the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP, a federal test run by the education stats office) shows scores dropped again—4 points in reading and 9 in math since 2019–20, and even worse versus a decade ago. The thread didn’t just read the report, it roasted it. One user literally “grepped” the text for mentions of COVID and found just a single line, fuming that the analysis dodges the elephant in the Zoom classroom. Meanwhile, others posted the cold, hard numbers and said the rot set in long before lockdowns.
That’s where the drama popped. Camp Pandemic shouted “remote school did this,” while Team Long Slide flashed a chart showing scores peaking in 2012 and trending toward 1980s levels. A third faction tossed a Molotov of modern life: “screen time and social media.” The mood swung from doom to gallows humor—think nerdy memes about Ctrl+F’ing “COVID” and jokes about the “Nation’s Report Card” needing extra credit. With declines worst for lower-performing math students, the stakes feel heavy, but the comments stayed spicy: was this a three-year shock or a ten-year slide? Either way, everyone’s arguing over who gets detention. Read more
Key Points
- •NAEP LTT assessments of 13-year-olds in fall 2022–23 show average declines of 4 points in reading and 9 points in mathematics compared to 2019–20.
- •Compared with a decade earlier, scores declined by 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.
- •Results are based on a nationally representative sample of about 8,700 students per subject, with comparisons based on statistical significance.
- •Reading scores fell at all selected percentiles since 2020; lower performers’ larger numeric declines were not significantly different from other groups in reading.
- •Mathematics scores declined at all selected percentiles, with significantly larger declines for lower-performing students than for higher-performing peers.