Newly released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data offer some of the first national comparison points for high school student achievement before and after the pandemic. The results show that since the pandemic, high school seniors have seen significant drops in reading and math scores.
These results show students have not fully recovered from the learning disruptions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. And compared with prepandemic period, the NAEP data show high school absenteeism has increased. Because high school experiences and achievement are closely linked with early adult outcomes, state and federal policymakers must continue their efforts to improve outcomes for high school students.
New NAEP scores further our understanding of postpandemic high school outcomes
The 2024 NAEP scores are the first assessment of national 12th grade reading and math scores since 2019, but evidence on other high school outcomes have indicated a slow and incomplete recovery from the pandemic.
Results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that 15-year-olds in the US experienced a substantial decline in math scores (18 points) from 2018 to 2022 but no change in reading literacy scores. Further, undergraduate enrollments among 18-to-20-year-olds remained below the prepandemic level in 2025. And SAT and ACT scores have also declined (PDF) slightly in recent years (with the caveats that not all students take these tests and colleges are more likely to make these tests optional than before the pandemic).
In 2024, NAEP reading scores in the fourth and eighth grades continued to decline relative to both 2022 and 2019, but math scores held steady or rebounded slightly from 2022 to 2024. This divergent trend—a slight recovery in math even as reading scores decline further—is evident on other national assessments of elementary and middle schoolers. Although it is difficult to tease out the reason for this divergence, researchers have suggested it may be easier to remediate skills in math, relative to reading.
The 12th grade NAEP scores appear to diverge from the results of 4th and 8th grade NAEP results as well as the PISA results, with both reading and math on the same downward trajectory.
Trends in NAEP scores among high school seniors have always been a bit of a puzzle for researchers. In particular, 12th grade scores have remained flat while 4th and 8th scores increased significantly in the early 2000s. Although it is difficult to know definitively why high school scores haven’t changed, one suggested explanation is the increase in the national high school graduation rate over time. This hypothesis posits that students who would have previously dropped out before the spring of their senior year now remain enrolled and are included in the testing pool. If these students are more likely to score poorly, their inclusion in the results would weigh down the average score, even if other students show some improvements
However, it’s unlikely that the decline in scores this year is substantially attributable to increased retention to senior year. After rising over the past two decades, the national graduation rate has stayed largely flat since 2019, meaning that12th grade NAEP score decreases are likely not attributable to the increased retention of students to senior year.
Rates of absenteeism have increased dramatically
One of the starkest NAEP findings is the student survey responses on absenteeism. Since 2002, most students who take the main NAEP are asked to estimate how many days of school they missed in the past month. Levels of absenteeism—particularly, the share of students reporting that they were absent three or more days in the past month—stayed relatively consistent before the pandemic but have jumped markedly in the years since. Even in spring 2024, four years after the start of the pandemic, levels of absenteeism across all three tested grades were markedly higher than in the prepandemic period.
Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress Main Reading Assessment, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing.
Note: Assessment administered in spring of academic year.
Increased absenteeism is associated with declines in student achievement, and students in classrooms with higher rates of chronic absenteeism can see lower academic outcomes. Although we can’t point to increased absenteeism as the direct cause of the decline in 12th graders’ NAEP scores, it is likely a contributing factor.
New tools are needed to improve high school outcomes
Students who took the 2024 12th grade NAEP are the first class to have all their high school experience take place after the COVID-19 pandemic. These students still have some learning loss relative to those who were seniors in spring 2019. The effects of learning loss can be lifelong and are projected to result in lower adult earnings and lower postsecondary attainment.
These sobering results highlight the importance of addressing learning loss for current and recent high schoolers. More research on methods to improve academic engagement for high school students is needed, and education leaders should continue to build systems to monitor and address absenteeism and to identify the skills, experiences, and competencies high schoolers need to improve long-term outcomes. As part of this work, the Urban Institute’s Student Upward Mobility Initiative is working to identify and measure the skills and competencies in late high school that propel students into economic mobility.
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