The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released today confirm what has long been suspected: COVID-19 had a deleterious effect on math and reading attainment. While NAEP results from the past decade have continually revealed that low scorers were declining and higher scorers were improving, today’s NAEP results reveal the dramatic widening of this trend between 2020 and 2022.

With these NAEP results, we should take pause to recognize how important it is to have a non-partisan, trustworthy source of evidence about the state of reading and math attainment in American education. As I noted in my Education Week article last month We Need NAEP, NAEP “results provide critical evidence of the pandemic’s impact on students’ education across the country that we can leverage to mitigate learning loss and advance learning.” In other words, these NAEP results are necessary to inform our Nation’s education recovery efforts as they identify opportunity gaps and locate them among historical trends. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the entity in which NAEP is situated, serves as the premier source for research, evaluation, and statistics that can help educators, policymakers, and stakeholders improve outcomes for all students. While NAEP data sheds light on the state of student achievement, IES’s other centers and programs are on-the-ground providing evidence-based resources to support State Educational Agencies (SEAs), Local Educational Agencies (LEAs), and most importantly, educators and students. The NAEP data released today brings into sharp focus how important and critical such data collections are to learning recovery and how urgently we need to provide timely, evidence-based, resources to support student learning and well-being for all.

For 50 years, Knowledge Alliance has strongly supported vigorous, sustained Federal support for education research and its use. Our members have been actively working to develop and disseminate evidence-based resources in the classroom. As we digest the despairing NAEP results, let us use this moment to support continued investment in IES and programs like NAEP. As the nation begins down the necessary path of learning recovery, we must harness the power of evidence so that we can develop and advance equitable solutions for this dire moment in time and change the trajectory of our nation’s learners.