Maine elementary and middle school students are continuing to struggle academically, according to the 2024 Nation’s Report Card.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card — has been used to gauge students’ level of academic achievement since 1969.
NAEP describes itself as “the largest nationally representative, continuing evaluation of the condition of education in the United States.”
Maine’s fourth graders are having an especially hard time in both reading and math, performing worse in comparison to both prior years’ scores and their counterparts nationwide.
Eighth graders in Maine also had a poor showing on the Nation’s Report Card, their scores remaining largely unchanged from last year and falling into the middle of the pack in comparison to similar students across the country.
The percentage of Maine students found to be proficient or advanced in reading has dropped by several points since 2022 and even more substantially since the late 90s and early 2000s.
There is a slightly higher percentage of fourth graders proficient or advanced in math compared to 2022, and the share of eighth graders to fall under this category has remained unchanged in the past two years.
When compared to their nationwide counterparts, fewer Maine students in both fourth and eighth grade are proficient or advanced in both reading and math.
Troublingly, neither fourth nor eighth grade students in Maine have managed to return to their pre-pandemic levels of academic performance.
Overall, there has been a roughly ten percent drop in the share of Maine’s fourth and eighth grade students who are either proficient or advanced in both math and science since 2019.
Not only do these percentages represent a significant year-over-year decline, but they are also some of the lowest nationwide.
Fourth graders are performing particularly poorly in comparison to their counterparts throughout the rest of the country.
Maine has the 7th lowest percentage of fourth graders proficient or advanced in math and the 6th lowest percentage of fourth graders who are proficient or advanced in reading.
Although Maine’s eighth graders make a comparatively better showing nationwide, with the 18th lowest level of reading proficiency and 21st lowest level of math proficiency, they still fall into the country’s bottom 50 percent.
Once a national leader in education, Maine’s K-12 public schools system has faced many challenges in recent years, including decreased test scores, increased behavioral and mental health issues among students, and a dire teacher shortage, according to a report published in 2024 by the Maine Policy Institute.
[RELATED: New Report Analyzes the Decades-Long Decline of Maine K-12 Education]
The report attributes Maine students’ declining academic success in part to a shift in educational policy driven by state and federal mandates that have “undermined local control over education” and burdened educators with multiple “deleterious effects” stemming from new teaching, testing and class management requirements.
It was also noted that Maine experienced one of the nation’s most significant drops in test scores as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This reflects students’ difficulty in bouncing back academically over the past few years.
The 2024 Nation’s Report Card released this week, however, shows that these continued declines in academic performance are not just isolated to Maine, particularly when it comes to students’ reading ability.
The average reading score for both fourth and eighth graders dropped by about two points since 2022. Although fourth grade math scores did improve by two points, eighth grade math scores have remained stagnant.
Compared to pre-pandemic levels, however, reading scores are down five points for both fourth and eighth graders, while fourth graders are behind by three points in math and eighth graders are down by eight.
To read more about how Maine students performed academically in 2024, check out the NAEP reports linked below:
- Maine’s 2024 Fourth Grade Reading Scores
- Maine’s 2024 Fourth Grade Math Scores
- Maine’s 2024 Eighth Grade Reading Scores
- Maine’s 2024 Eighth Grade Math Scores
Watch Maine Wire’s Alicia Farmer interview Maine Policy Institute Research Fellow Jonah Davids on the NAEP results:
Disclaimer: The Maine Wire is a project of the Maine Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works to expand individual liberty and economic freedom in Maine.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="34625 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=34625">6 Comments
Sorry to say but considering the state of the education system In maine there are only a few school age children that can read and the ones who can were taught by their parents, conservatives. Democrats love dumb uneducated drones, in public and in Augusta.
Keep paying those property taxes and other taxes so the teachers can work less and less. Add to that most of the resources goes to wonderful ILLEGAL ALIENS kids in school who cant speak and read English, so your kids suffer. How’s that working for you Mainers? Is it bad enough for you yet?
Not to worry.
Janet Mills doesn’t care a whip about the three R’s .
We are are going to indoctrinate our school kids INSTEAD into believing the world will implode in 25
years from the “ Existential Threat of Climate Change “
The Oceans will boil , the forests will burn , the crops will die , the air will be too toxic to breath .
If Mainers won’t use their heat pumps , drive electric cars , use their state required washing machines ,
cover their roofs with solar panels , and line windmills up like telephone poles , we will all die .
She told us this much in her “ budget “ speech . A million and a half tax dollars in grants to local school. systems who will agree to drill this into our kids heads .
Just like the novel 1984 , our kids will be trained to report their family , friends , neighbors , and relatives who dare to not bend to Janet’s twisted ideology.
“:Maines Permanent Department of Climate Ideology “ Look out voters
HERE IT COMES .
you have to have Knowledge to teach someone … The Indoctrination Specialists working in ALL US School Systems are taught how to Indoctrinate the youth into the Cult of Gov’t Worship…Being a College Educated Militant Feminist Dyke is not a Guarantee of Intelligence.
Just another instance of unions and democrats ruin everything they touch, including children. How many teachers are democrats, how many donate to democrats. How many more administrators do we have in the school system, that we can do without.
In the 1990’s Maine students ranked 1st or 2nd in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for math and reading. By 2022 the state ranked 36th! Teachers autonomy was undermined as the education of Maine children was determined increasingly.by politicians, bureaucrats and consultants who brought in experimental methods and programs. Scores dropped drastically when schools went online and the Maine DOE began prioritizing social-emotional learning and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Dismally Maines’ Commissioner of Education determined that students are underperforming in school because they are stressed, anxious and traumatized and that academic learning must be halted until students FEEL SAFE,HEALTHY AND ENGAGED. Defund the Department of Education and get back to basics.