High school seniors' reading plummets to lowest level since 1992: NAEP

Reading skills of high school seniors have hit the lowest point they have been at in three decades, according to new testing data that has been released. In math, the scores also came in at a low point, with scores coming in the worst place they have been since 2005.

The data comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, which has been the gold standard of testing for decades for the skills of high school students. Now with the advancements of AI, those with lower reading skills may be at an even greater disadvantage in the workplace. The test determined that only 35 percent of high school seniors were performing at or above reading level for their grade.

The last time scores were lower than that was in 1992, and the scores from 2024 are the first to be released officially since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The NAEP says that being proficient in reading as a standard means "students likely can connect key details within and across texts and use those details to draw complex inferences about author's purpose, tone, word choice, and related ideas."

However, most students were at a basic reading level or lower. The NAEP defines basic as that “students likely can locate and identify relevant details in the text in order to support literal comprehension.” 38 percent of high school seniors were below basic level.

Only 22 percent of high school seniors also performed at or above proficiency when it came to math skills. Nearly half of the 12th graders were below basic level. In the math test, NAEP defines basic skills as students who can "likely can determine probabilities of simple events from 2-way tables and verbal descriptions."

Those who are proficient, however, can "likely can distinguish between, find, and compare experimental and theoretical probabilities."