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.
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
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.
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