Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Larry Sand. Larry is a retired teacher and president of the California

Teachers Empowerment Network. He's written about education issues for City Journal for many years,

and his work also appears in USA Today, the Orange County Register, National Review, New York Post,

and a number of other distinguished publications. Today, we're going to discuss his recent work

on his fate of education in America. So, Larry, thanks very much for joining us.

Pleasure to be here, Brian. Thank you for having me.

The National Assessment of educational progress is a test.

It's regularly administered to American students.

Measuring their knowledge in key subjects, math, reading, history, science, and more.

It's often referred to as the nation's report card.

The NAEP, as it's known, NAEP scores provide valuable insight into student performance over time.

And, you know, you can get a snapshot of the health of our education system from it.

The latest scores, which were based, I believe, on tests that were administered in 2022,

showed some alarming declines in a number of subjects.

So I wonder if you could give us a quick overview of those latest

NAEP scores and how they looked, you know, depending on subject and grade level.

Yeah, well, the scores that were released for eighth graders, in other words, 13-year-olds.

And Peggy Carr, who's the Commissioner of the National Center for Educational Statistics.

And I quote her here, the mathematics decline for 13-year-olds, single artist decline we've

observed in the past half century.

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