Gaps Get Bad, But Hope Lives On: 6 Lessons From A Devastating International Mathematical Trial

“There is a shrinking institution,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is responsible for administering TIMSS in the country. Carr said this group of students is being pushed to the bottom — a pattern he’s seen across various tests and subjects since the pandemic began.

US 4th graders in TIMSS, 1995–2023, by percent of students

One way to understand the shrinking middle class is to see how few American children have met basic math standards. The test found that 13 percent of fourth graders could add and subtract three-digit numbers, multiply and divide one-digit numbers and solve simple word problems. In 2019, the last time the test was conducted, only 7 percent of fourth graders could handle these basics. In 2023, 32 percent of American fourth graders could not reach the second of four, so-called “intermediate,” meaning they could not multiply three-digit numbers, add decimals or measure exact distances. In other words, a third of fourth graders struggle with grade-level math.

England, Germany, and Portugal all had more students hitting and exceeding these two minimum levels. (Click here to see how many fourth graders in each country reached the four levels: elementary, middle, high, and advanced.)

“Decentralization is something that divides the United States,” Carr said. While the average decline was more pronounced in fourth-grade scores, Carr said he saw a similar decline in the skills of US adults, ages 16-65, in another 2023 international test, also released this month.

A growing bifurcation of math skills between a small group at the top and a growing group at the bottom, with a hole in the middle, shows the distribution of income among US households. “It looks like society,” said Goldhaber, a labor economist who worries that the loss of education caused by the pandemic will make it harder for many young Americans to earn a living. “They predict greater inequality in the future,” he said.

Even high-scoring eighth graders did not have poor math skills

The math story with eighth graders is different from that of fourth graders. The achievement gap between lower and upper eighth graders has not widened. But the figures for the top students dropped significantly, 50 percent more than those at the bottom.

It is not clear what is causing the decline.

These eighth graders were in fifth grade when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. Despite tutoring and extra help at home, many students in the top 90th percentile appeared to be less proficient in math skills than middle school and high-scoring eighth graders. .

These results show the importance of teaching math at school as children grow, and how difficult it is for families on a budget to make up for missed learning time.

The gender gap is resurfacing

Historically, American boys test better than girls in math. That gender gap disappeared in 2015 for eighth graders. But as the scores dropped, the gender gap reappeared in 2023. The gender gap hasn’t disappeared in fourth-grade math, but in 2023, boys outnumbered girls by the largest margin ever.

Boys also outperformed girls in eighth grade math

The historic boy-girl gap in fourth-grade mathematics

‘Crazy’ patterns around the world

William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, has studied international testing for decades and analyzed math curricula around the world. He called the 2023 TIMSS results the “craziest” he had ever seen and said it was difficult to make sense of the mixed results. Some of the best performing countries have fallen significantly but still remain at the top. Meanwhile, Turkish students, who had never been a successful nation, suddenly rose to the top. It will take time to work out what that means. (Here are the international standards for fourth- and eighth-grade math.)

Students in Sweden, which kept schools open during the crisis, posted the highest numbers between 2019 and 2023. Their fourth graders made history. Still, analysts couldn’t say whether the shorter school closures were linked to greater statistical gains. Sometimes, results go in opposite directions within the same country. For example, fourth grade English students have slipped while eighth grade English students have improved. The Covid closure was the same for both groups of students. Schmidt says it will take a lot of time for researchers to collect this data and analyze it. (Here are the historical math scores, from 1995 to 2023, for each nation among fourth- and eighth-graders.)

It calculates the effect of Covid

Another puzzle is how much of the decline in US math is to be attributed to Covid and how much to other problems in American math education. Notably, math scores for fourth graders in the US have been declining since 2011. Eighth graders have been posting the lowest math scores since 2015. They may have continued to decline between 2019 and 2023 if the pandemic had not occurred.

Reasons to be optimistic

Disappointingly, the United States is consistently ranked among the top 10 nations in terms of statistics. (In the 2023 TIMSS, US eighth graders ranked 22nd out of 44 countries and subnational states.)

Still, there are 360,000 American eighth graders in the top 10 percent who score the highest of the four. Singapore’s top-performing average students do the same, but only 33,000 eighth-graders in the state, according to Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments. Some of these advanced US students may end up developing skills to cure cancer or find a less expensive alternative to fossil fuels. Others will start companies and drive the American economy forward.

“One lesson from this is that the size of the United States helps a lot,” Loveless said. “We produce 360,000 children every year who go to high school, and they know a very large amount of math.”

Another possible bright spot is that this TIMSS test was conducted in the spring of 2023, a year and a half ago. Since then, several state tests for 2024 show that students are multiplying, albeit by small amounts. Scores for spring 2024 are highest in New York, Florida and California. “Forty years from now, we may see these TIMSS scores as under-representing the full impact of this epidemic,” Loveless said. “We may have progress from here on out.”

If there is duplication, we should be able to find it in the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered earlier this year. Those scores are expected to be released in early 2025. I’ll be on the lookout for them.

Contact a staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or [email protected].