On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education released the results of 2019’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, and they are deeply disappointing. Reading scores are down nationwide for both fourth and eighth grades, with only the District of Columbia and Mississippi showing improvement in either grade.
What’s worse, the 2019 scores show no improvement from a decade earlier. While the picture is slightly better for math, this news is sobering. It should also be motivating to educators, advocates and policymakers. Unfortunately, the response from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is to simply throw up her hands. Her only plan involves massive funding cuts to public education and abandoning our responsibility to help schools improve by pushing ideological private school voucher schemes.
The above excerpt was originally published in Forbes.
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