American elementary school students aren't terrible at math—in a study of students in 58 countries, they were somewhere in the middle of the pack—but officials are alarmed by a steep decline in their skills in recent years. The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which gathers data on fourth graders and eighth graders every four years, found that American fourth graders dropped 18 points in math between 2019 and 2023, the New York Times reports. The decline among eighth graders was 27 points. Before 2019, there'd been decades of improvements, but the scores are now back to where they were in 1995, the first year of the study.
"This is alarming," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, tells the Times. "These are sharp, steep declines." Disruption to education during the pandemic is seen as one possible cause for the drops, but the declines weren't universal: The Guardian reports that Australian students scored their best-ever results in the assessment. Among American students, the decline among fourth graders was largely due to a drop in the scores among students ranked in the bottom 25% of achievers, while the decline among eighth graders was more broad, the Times reports.
The US still performed slightly above the average among the 58 countries, on par with countries including Hungary and Portugal. Matthias von Davier, a professor at Boston College and executive director of the center that administers the study's exam, says the long-term results for the US are "glass half full, glass half empty." He notes that results tend to be stagnant in larger, wealthier countries, while smaller or developing countries are more likely to make investments that result in rapid improvements. The top five in the study were all in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. (More math stories.)
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