Since academic-recovery efforts began, researchers have warned that the scope and scale of getting millions of students to read and do math at grade level wasn’t grand enough—that returning to pre-pandemic levels of student achievement would require several times more funding, and deeper systemic changes to how schools operate.

The average math score for eighth grade students was unchanged from 2022, while reading scores fell 2 points at both grade levels.

Released this week, the results of the NAEP, a congressionally mandated test designed to measure the general state of education nationally, paint a grim picture of student performance at both the fourth and eighth-grade levels in reading and math.