Nation’s Report Card Shows Failing Public School Performance but Growing Catholic School Advantage

The National Center for Education Statistics gives academic exams to random samples of students in all 50 states, producing what is known as the annual “Nation’s Report Card.” The latest release of 4th and 8th grade mathematics and reading results from the report card, officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, show that America’s public schools got a D-minus. Fortunately, the results also demonstrate which narratives to reject in searching for an explanation.

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card results were the second post-pandemic set of exams. Sadly, the 2024 results were even worse than the 2022 results: while higher-scoring public school students show modest signs of recovery, lower-scoring students have continued to slide. We have little to show for the $190 billion Congress budgeted in large part for academic recovery after the pandemic, but there are bright spots in the data. Catholic schools show a large and growing academic advantage.

Catholic school students held academic advantages on the 2013 Nation Report Card exams, which varied between a half a grade level and a grade and half worth of academic progress over their public school counterparts. On the 2024 exams, those gaps had grown to a minimum of a grade level (in 4th grade mathematics) to a grade and a half (in 4th grade reading) to approximately two grade levels in both 8th grade exams.

The Catholic school academic advantage has only grown over time in all four assessments. The fact that the gap is larger in 8th grade than 4th grade is consistent with research on the cumulative advantages of school vouchers—vouchers that parents can use to send their children to the schools of their choice instead of the schools assigned to them because of their ZIP codes. Schools chosen by families have an inherent advantage in developing a strong culture and a shared vision of a high-quality education.

Smartphone/social media use has been advanced as a possible explanation for the decline in achievement, which began before the pandemic. While we certainly should not dismiss the pernicious impact of such technologies, it is well worth noting that students attending Catholic schools access both smartphones and social media, too.

As one example of the power of school choice, Louisiana, which has been expanding school choice and improving public school curriculum, saw its National Assessment of Educational Progress scores improve between 2022 and 2024. Economically disadvantaged students in Louisiana went from having a score that was statistically significantly lower than the similar students nationally in 2019, to effectively a tie in 2022, to a statistically significantly higher score in 2024. Pelican State students likely made this progress because of dual efforts to expand options and improve instruction.

Perhaps our fault lies not in our phones, but in ourselves. America has spent the last five decades trying to spend our way to better schools, and the broad federal COVID-19 Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding failure simply represents the latest dot in a long line.

Famed British theorist and professor Stafford Beer coined the phrase POSIWID—short for “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Beer noted that the stated purpose of a system is sometimes at odds with the intentions of those who design, operate, and promote it. “There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do,” Beer observed.

POSIWID in the American K-12 system leads to the conclusion that the public education system operates to increase taxpayer spending and adult employment, not necessarily to successfully educate students. Spending and employment both reached all-time highs, in part because of the COVID-19 federal “relief” funding, even as academic deficits went unaddressed. Far from accidental, this implosion in the productivity of K-12 spending serves the financial and political interests of district employee unions and their allies.

The public school system constantly fails to equip students with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to flourish and exercise responsible citizenship. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has been documenting this sad situation for decades, and the 2024 results represent more of the same. The reasons for this failure are deep-seated and highly resistant to change. You should make education plans for your children and grandchildren accordingly.

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