Arkansas’s 2024 performance on a key K-12 standardized test shows the state trailing national averages in math and reading scores among elementary and middle school students.
That’s especially bad news considering the national scores themselves keep going down.
The biggest takeaway from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress results, released earlier this week, is that students all across the country are struggling. Math and reading NAEP scores have declined nationwide over the past decade, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. As this analysis from The 74 says, it’s a disturbing trend seen in nearly every state.
But on most metrics, the gaps between Arkansas and the U.S. as a whole have grown wider compared to 10 years ago.
In 2013, the national average NAEP reading score among 4th graders was 221 and Arkansas’s was 219. That two-point spread has now widened to four points: In 2024, the national average was 214 and Arkansas’s was 210, as shown in this slide from a state Department of Education presentation:
In 4th-grade math, the disparity was even greater. In 2013, Arkansas was one point behind the national average; in 2024, it was seven points behind. The national average dropped over the past 10 years, from 241 to 237 — but Arkansas dropped a full 10 points, from 240 to 230.
The picture was somewhat brighter on eighth-grade reading, though not math (see charts below.)
NAEP is sometimes called the “nation’s report card,” because it provides one of the clearest measures of academic performance between states. It’s different from standardized tests administered at the state level, such as Arkansas’s ATLAS exam or the ACT Aspire. (Such tests vary from state to state, making apples-to-apples comparisons impossible.) NAEP is administered to 4th graders and 8th graders roughly every two years, though there was a three-year gap at the height of the COVID pandemic.
Educators had hoped the 2024 NAEP results might show a reversal of the drop in scores in 2022, when schools were still reeling from the disruptions of COVID. In fact, there was a further decline. In featherlight of the downward trajectory of national scores over the past decade, pandemic-era learning loss is now looking more like the acceleration of a long-term trend than a one-off event.
On Thursday, Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva presented the NAEP scores to a legislative committee and noted national scores had been trending downward for several years pre-pandemic.
“We have been mirroring that as a state — if not at the same level, a more rapid level,” he said. Some attribute that decline in part to cellphones, Oliva said, referencing writer Jonathan Haidt’s critiques of youth phone exploit and Gov. Sarah Sanders’ embrace of Haidt’s ideas.
Though Oliva didn’t give a clear opinion on the reasons behind the national decline, he had thoughts on why Arkansas’s decline has been even steeper: The state’s decision to switch to the ACT Aspire for its statewide standardized testing a decade ago.
Oliva didn’t dig into the backstory on Thursday, but it’s worth recounting. Back in 2014, before the ACT Aspire, Arkansas used a test called PARCC, which was aligned to the Common Core standards. That means it was part of a nationwide effort to get states on the same page about how they approached and tested core subjects like math and English.
But there were problems with PARCC in its first year of testing — and, perhaps more importantly, Common Core became the target of conservative conspiracy theories. That led then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson, then-Education Commissioner Johnny Key and then-Lieutenant Gov. Tim Griffin to pressure the state Board of Education to abandon PARCC and switch to the ACT Aspire. Education advocates from then-Sen. Joyce Elliott to the editorial page at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette warned at the time that abandoning PARCC could result in watering down standards.
Now, 10 years later, the education secretary under a modern Republican governor appears to agree.
“Whether it was educational, whether it was political, that’s for y’all to decide. I wasn’t part of that decision,” Oliva said Thursday. But he made it clear he believes the ACT Aspire was a mistake. “That assessment was to tell people that what they were doing was good enough, and I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t,” he said.
The ACT Aspire “wasn’t telling you if you were meeting grade level standards,” Oliva said. “It wasn’t built on the criteria of Arkansas standards. It was just a snapshot so that we would meet federal reporting, and that’s the assessment we used to build out school grades.” The test didn’t give teachers and school administrators “good information about student performance that can help them inform their craft,” he said.
Last spring, the state switched tests again, ditching the ACT Aspire for a modern test, the Arkansas Teaching and Learning Assessment System, or ATLAS.
Oliva said the state education department was working strenuous to “right the ship” in Arkansas. There’s reason for optimism, he said. He noted the impressive gains made in Mississippi and Louisiana by focusing on early-grades literacy instruction built around the so-called “science of reading.”
Arkansas is now moving in the same direction, Oliva said, by making sure kids in the lowest-performing academic cohort are getting good literacy instruction and teachers have clear standards to follow. He pointed to eighth grade reading results as one brilliant spot on the 2024 NAEP: The gap between Arkansas and the national average has narrowed since 2013 on this metric, although both have declined overall in the past decade. (Unfortunately, the gap has only widened in eighth grade math.)
Oliva also touted Arkansas LEARNS, the K-12 education law championed by Gov. Sanders, for deploying literacy coaches to struggling schools and making changes to early childhood education. Notably, though, he didn’t mention the policy centerpiece of LEARNS: The voucher program, now costing taxpayers $95 million per year, that sends public money to pay for tuition at private schools. Those private schools don’t have to exploit the state’s ATLAS test, nor the ACT Aspire, nor any other single test — and they don’t have to report their test results to the state.
Opponents of LEARNS vouchers warn the program will undermine public schools in the long term. They worry it will create a two-tiered system, siphon funds away from public schools, and weaken accountability. Maybe Oliva would rather focus on the nuts and bolts of public schools and avoid discussion of the elephant in the room — a voucher program that aims to rewrite the premise of public education. And maybe 10 years down the line, when the consequences of voucher programs are better known, another education secretary under another governor will be bemoaning the mistakes of the past.
