American students continue to struggle in both reading and math.

And the gap between the highest and lowest performing kids is widening to historic levels.

That's all according to new data from a biennial national test administered to fourth and eighth graders known as the nation's report card.

Across the board, test scores remain below pre-pandemic numbers.

Compared to 2019, fourth graders dropped three points in math and five points in reading,

eighth graders dropped eight points in math, and five points in reading. The loan exception

was a slight uptick in fourth grade math results compared to 2022. We're joined now by Jared Polis.

He's the governor of Colorado

and chair of the National Governors Association,

where he's leading a new bipartisan education policy initiative.

Governor, welcome. Thanks for being with us.

A pleasure of joining you.

So as you know, the federal government sent

some $190 billion to schools across the

country since 2021, moving out of the pandemic. A lot of people thought that would help us to see a

bounce back from those pandemic numbers. Aside from fourth grade math, as we just showed, we didn't

see that. Why not?

So here's what was announced today and why this is news. This is called NAEP, which is also called the nation's report card. This is basically the same test given to fourth graders to

eighth graders in all 50 states. What we normally have at any given year is we have state

standardized tests. But guess what? They're different from state to state, so it's really hard to compare.

That's why this nation's report card in NAEP is so important.

It allows us to compare between Alabama, California, Colorado.

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