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Last winter, the federal government released the results of its semi-annual reading and math tests of fourth- and eighth-graders, assessments that are considered the most authoritative measure of the state of learning in American elementary and middle schools. In nearly every category, the scores had plunged to levels unseen for decades — or ever. On reading tests, 40 percent of fourth-graders and one-third of eighth-graders performed below “basic,” the lowest threshold. A separate assessment of 12th-graders conducted this past spring — the first since schools were shuttered by the COVID pandemic — yielded similarly crushing results. Many graduated from high school without the ability to decipher this sentence. How can I assume that? The test asked them to define the word decipher, and 24 percent got it wrong.

“You can’t believe how low ‘below basic’ is,” says Carol Jago, a former public-school teacher who has served on the board that oversees the test, which is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “The things that those kids aren’t able to do is frightening.” Fourth-graders were presented with a multiple-choice question about a passage from the children’s book The Tale of Despereaux, asking why the main character, a mouse, decides not to eat a book. Nearly 30 percent could not pick the answer (“He wants to read it instead”). A similar proportion of eighth-graders failed to come up with the following sum:

12 (-4) 12 4 = _______.

By the 12th grade, students are asked by the National Assessment to demonstrate fundamental capacities of a thinking adult, like recognizing the point of a persuasive essay. One math problem set out a scenario involving a restaurant check:

Test-takers were asked to add the costs of these six items and calculate a 20 percent tip. Three-quarters of the high-schoolers were unable to correctly answer one or both parts of the question.

If you, like me, are a middle-aged parent, you may remember that adults complained that education was crumbling when you were a kid too and you turned out fine anyway. You may be proud of your public school and have the magnetic car decal to prove it. You may think that, whatever the headlines say, your child is progressing well enough toward literacy and numeracy. You may be deluded.

“I don’t think parents know that their kids are behind,” says Chad Aldeman, a former Obama-administration education official who has analyzed declines in student achievement. Annual standardized-test results often arrive after the school year is over and can be hard to interpret. Teacher feedback is subjective. And a report card can offer false comfort if grading standards have gotten easier; some education-policy wonks speak of “B-flation.” While test scores can be made to mean too much, and no one likes seeing a process as magical as a child’s intellectual development reduced to a number, the hard data does tell us something we can’t otherwise know.

“There’s just been a tremendous amount of obfuscation,” says Thomas Kane, a Harvard University professor who is the co-leader of a project called the Education Recovery Scorecard. The willful ignorance starts at the top with Donald Trump, who fired the head of the Department of Education’s data division and much of its staff earlier this year, and flows down through the state governments to the district level. Kane’s project has tried to reckon the lost ground. Using a database of test results for some 35 million students in elementary and middle school, compiled with researchers at Stanford University, his group found that, on average, students are about a half a grade level behind their pre-pandemic counterparts in both math and reading. That top-line figure is troubling enough, since learning is cumulative and it’s hard for kids to catch up, but the averages mask what experts call a “fanning” effect — a widening disparity between the scores of high-performing and low-performing students.

If you look at a chart of test scores from the 1990s to the present, it arcs happily upward until the middle of the last decade as each generation incrementally learned a little more. To take but one example: In 2015, fourth-graders registered their highest reading scores ever, about a full grade level above their counterparts in 2000. Average increases like these were primarily driven by outsize gains by the lowest-scoring cohort of students as they caught up to the kids at the top. Disparities between the performance of white students and Black students narrowed. The gender gap in math disappeared, and girls were performing just as well as boys.

Then, about a decade ago, that progress began to reverse. The students scoring in the 90th percentile — the effortless and self-motivated learners — are still doing about as well on standardized tests, and in some cases better than ever, but the bottom-performing cohort is now doing far worse. “At the tenth percentile, achievement has declined by almost two grade equivalents,” Kane says. The old racial and gender gaps have once again started to grow larger. Girls are now behind boys in math by a third of a grade level. By the time those record-setting fourth-graders of 2015 graduated as the class of 2023, high-school students were registering all-time lows in reading.

Something disastrous happened here, and academics are nearly united in the opinion that the problem is not simply a product of the pandemic. The declines started before 2020 and have continued since. COVID was an accelerant, but it seems education is suffering from something deeper and more ineradicable than a disease. Adults with the best view inside the system — teachers and administrators — will tell you it starts at the beginning. Kindergartners are performing worse on assessments that measure their ability to perform simple cognitive tasks, like identifying a trait that lions and tigers share from a list. A former first-grade teacher says a substantial number of children who went through kindergarten on Zoom showed up in her classroom without the ability to visually process text, let alone read it.

In middle school, a math teacher in the affluent suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, says some of his regular students cannot calculate perfect squares in their heads; some English-language learners in his summer-school class were still doing math with their fingers. At a STEM-focused magnet high school in New Jersey, an English teacher says her students used to take 20 minutes to read short stories in class; now the task consumes nearly a whole period. Harvard has introduced a remedial algebra course to address learning gaps in its incoming first-year students — and if they can’t do math, what does that mean for the rest?

“I’ve got kids who don’t know what the word seldom means or appoint or sanctuary,” says a veteran Bay Area high-school history teacher. “The pandemic didn’t do shit. It just stripped bare for suburban parents the reality of what was happening.”

America’s atomized school system, with its emphasis on local control, assures that every district is unhappy in its own way. Mine is in Montclair, New Jersey, a town that fancies itself an island of suburban urbanity and a place that must be home to more writers, journalists, cable-news producers, podcasters, late-night talk-show hosts (okay, just one of those: Stephen Colbert), and more-a-comment-than-a-question callers to The Brian Lehrer Show per capita than any municipality in the country. It’s a place brainy people move to — lately, paying a million dollars or more for a house — because they desire to be around like-minded folks with liberal values who care about the quality of our public education, which we finance via exorbitant property taxes. We love our schools, and we repeat that mantra to ourselves even in the face of mounting evidence that we have let them languish. In this, we are far from exceptional.

I moved to Montclair in 2015, the year my son entered preschool, which was also the very moment that student achievement began to decline. (Lucky boy.) At the time, political battles were raging over the use and misuse of standardized-test scores. In retrospect, these conflicts can be seen as the death throes of a period of centrist consensus about education policy, which ran through the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all of whom shared a basic belief that improving student achievement was a governmental priority and a civil-rights concern. No Child Left Behind, a signature piece of Bush legislation, created a regimen of testing and accountability measures for districts, schools, and teachers. Many left-of-center interest groups — teachers unions especially — despised the law and the education-reform movement that formed around it, especially after its most zealous adherents started to use test scores to justify divisive actions like revoking union tenure protections for teachers and directing public resources to charter schools. Progressive parents rallied around traditional public schools and their teachers and rebelled against the rote mind-set that an overemphasis on test scores created, which sucked creativity and joy out of the classroom. In 2015, it was common to see anti-testing yard signs around Montclair. Some 40 percent of its students opted out of the state exams that year.

“They were using those test scores to beat the hell out of everybody,” says Julie Borst, executive director of an advocacy group called Save Our Schools NJ. It is unsurprising that scores increased, opponents of testing argue, when the policy put testing at the center of everything schools did. They say that No Child Left Behind’s goal of bringing all children to “proficiency,” a technical term for mastery of grade-level skills, was unrealistic and cite a long line of studies that have found student achievement is far more dependent on outside factors, like demographic makeup and family-income levels, than anything schools can control. “This data has been telling you the exact same thing since the 1980s,” Borst says. “ ‘It’s poverty, stupid.’ ” Schools didn’t need more incentives to teach children, the progressives argued. They needed more money.

If you wanted to test the proposition that money matters more than any other factor when it comes to student achievement, there might be no better place to do it than Montclair. Our community is wealthy and, by the standards of suburban districts, racially mixed — Black and Hispanic students and students with multiple racial backgrounds represent about 45 percent of the district’s enrollment. Since the 1970s, Montclair has operated a magnet system designed to maintain........

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