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America's high school seniors are falling behind.

The decline in math and reading scores is more than a statistic.

It's a warning sign about our future. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025.

If the next generation is leaving high school and stepping into adulthood with fewer core

educational skills than the generation before, where does that leave them as they try to compete

at colleges and universities and in the workforce? And where does that leave the nation when it

comes to our global competitiveness? Here to dig into the nation's report card

is Martin West, academic dean at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for joining me, Martin.

It's great to be with you, Dana. The downward trend in students' test scores may have been

exacerbated by the pandemic, but the latest student assessment show that core

learning was in decline prior to 2020. What do you see as the most significant underlying

factor that's led to the decline? Well, I should say that the scores you're referring to come

from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often known as the nation's report card.

And they're the only source of data on achievement that we have that's nationally representative

and comparable over time.

And you're right that despite all the attention that we've been paying to pandemic learning

loss, that as we look at the pattern of

results, we see that things have actually been moving in the wrong direction since the early

part of the last decade. So around 2009 in 12th grade reading, around 2015 and 12th grade math,

...