Nat Malkus
Appearances
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, I mean, scores just came out last month and showed additional declines in reading, maybe that we weren't expecting. And look, everybody looks at these things in the now and they're thinking, well, it's the pandemic, right? But you're absolutely right that... On a bunch of tests, there's a peak somewhere between 2012, 2015. 2013 is a good place to put it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And that's sort of the height of scores in reading and in math. And here we're talking about nationally representative data. But if you look at those averages, and they're substantial declines. They're not small. But the average declines in reading are worth being alarmed about. But that's not quite the full story.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, the elite college students are definitely at the top of the scoring distribution by and large, which you would expect. What we've seen is from 2013 to the most recent test scores, and again, there's variation across tests, but generally the highest performing students, they've been pretty much flat. They took a little bit of a hit during the pandemic and are largely sort of doing okay.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
They're treading water. The kids on the low end, the kids at the 25th percentile and the 10th percentile, they've taken a huge nosedive. It's been large. It's been consistent. If anything, it looks like it's getting faster. And in this latest round, the bigger hits were in reading, not in math.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, I mean, we've known for some time, right, we have a black-white achievement gap. And we think about the achievement gap as black and white because white students on average score higher than African-American students. There's a Hispanic white gap. There's a poor, non-poor gap. And so, yeah, there's some disadvantages.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Disadvantaged students typically don't score as high as more advantaged students on a number of things. But that's not what's driving what we've seen lately.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
In preliminary work where we've been looking at these NAEP scores, it looks like the gap between the 90th and the 10th percentile in this period has been growing faster than achievement gaps divided by black and white students or poor and non-poor students. So achievement gaps aren't what they used to be.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
The data on this is a little thinner, but if you look, for instance, at TIMSS, which I did in a recent paper, that's math and science scores. You have a bunch of countries that have the scores during the same period, the 2013-15 zone until now. America's achievement gap during that time, again, between the top scores and the bottom scores, grew more than any other country.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So this thing that we're seeing in U.S. student test scores is not only something that's confined by this time period. If you compare it to other countries, we're sort of number one in the world in a category we don't necessarily want to be number one in.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, NAP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's usually called NAEP. It's a test where usually fourth and eighth graders in math and reading every couple of years take this test. It's nationally representative. Over the two tests and the two subjects, you have almost half a million kids take it. So it's a huge sample, gives very reliable data.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And since we run it every couple of years, we can go back You know, decades and look at the trajectory so we can really compare these things. And we know what each state is scoring. We know some metro areas. That's NAEP. On the international tests, these are tests that are similar, but they might be for an age range. or a year in school that are comparable.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And not all countries participate in it, but it's usually run through the OECD. And there's a lot of countries for comparison as long as they're taking the test in the same year.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, the test scores are good at identifying where we are, but not why we we got there. So there are a couple of the big education policy shifts that are in America that kind of fit that. So one is sort of this is kind of at the tail end of No Child Left Behind, which was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. And, you know, just slow down.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, so No Child Left Behind sort of was in force through the 2000s, and this was from the Bush administration in 2002, and it insisted that every state test students from third to eighth grade every year in reading and math, and that we hold students accountable for, or schools rather, accountable for students' test scores. This was a huge leap forward.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
in terms of bringing accountability to schools. Not everybody loved it. ESSA was sort of, to put it bluntly, sort of a defanging of No Child Left Behind. The test scores are still there. The bite was gone. And so how does this sort of rhyme with these test scores? Well, it seems, or you could at least line it up and say, well, the teeth and the accountability went away around the time
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
that these student test scores, particularly the lower-performing students, started to fall off. And so maybe the timing works, and it is certainly an American phenomenon, so that might explain why it happened here at that time differently than it happened in other countries.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
No, it is complicated. It's a little more complicated than that, though. I'd say that in No Child Left Behind, that was sort of born out of an era where we had this sort of purple education reform compromise. That was kind of real for a long time. This is the same time period when you... might see a lot more folks in the Democrat Party supporting charter schools and so forth.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
These sort of left-right agreements were much, much stronger. And over No Child Left Behind, that sort of devolved somewhat, maybe not only because of education policy. I think there might have been some other reasons for polarization over that decade. But by the time ESSA came around, that left-right sort of, truce had fallen apart to some degree.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And then the other thing about it was there were a lot of states with a lot of complaints about the overreach in No Child Left Behind. It wasn't a perfect bill, so there was plenty of grist for that mill.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, No Child Left Behind put in place both the measurement of reading scores and some accountability measures, some consequences. And those were particularly aimed at shoring up the floor. It wasn't as much about, hey, let's get the highest achievers moving up. And ESSA sort of defanged that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Honestly, I don't think it's a super potent explanation for this because I don't know how much No Child Left Behind improved student test scores. There's evidence it did improve them, but not whether it improved them that much and certainly not in sort of similar sizes to the declines we've seen since.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Well, certainly, how we teach students to read matters. And a couple of years ago, this podcast, Sold a Story, came out and really shone a light on, well, maybe the way we're teaching students to read in schools is not as based on the science of reading as it should be. And I think that one thing to note is that that wasn't a recent departure from phonics.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
we probably haven't been teaching students to read in appropriate ways for quite some time. The change that that push towards the science of reading has brought, which has been seen in state legislatures who've been passing science of reading laws across the board, really came about in the past couple of years.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I don't know that we're going to see those changes in the test scores that we've seen so far. Certainly, I think that the decline in reading that we've seen, particularly among the lower performers, is probably not related to the recent focus on the science of reading instruction just because the timelines don't match up.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
It's not like we were teaching phonics up to this 2013 mark and then stopped. We probably haven't been giving the highest quality reading instruction for a lot longer than that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, there absolutely is. I think we don't have anywhere near as good of data on how well adults read. However, we do have this international test, PIAC, and it's had some problems, and I'm hesitant to use it, except it's the only nationally representative data we have. So given that proviso, it shows a remarkably similar pattern to what we're seeing in student scores.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
That is the highest performers on PIAC, their numeracy scores have stayed relatively flat. And our lowest performers, I mean, it dropped like a rock. Now, some of that drop may be overextended. I don't think you should think about this as, well, it's exactly this much of a drop.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
However, a drop even at half the size that the scores reflect is absolutely alarming, and it rhymes very well with the student test scores.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
If we thought this was something that happened to second graders in a given year, we would expect, like you said, a cascading effect. So fourth graders two years later, eighth graders, they might peak four years later because this event for this group in this grade then shows up down the line. That's not what we're seeing just among the sort of fourth, eighth, even 15-year-old test scores.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
The peaks were very similar and have come down since. The one thing that I'll say about it that you do have to map on is, well, does that make sense for the lower performers, but not for the higher performers? Because that's the distinction that still is maintained today, both for adults and For students on the vast majority of these tests, the top performers are treading water.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So, look, I'll tell you that I don't have a perfectly satisfactory answer. This is tough. I've laid out that this is, you know, sort of started in around 2013. You have this division between the top and bottom performers. It's also a U.S. phenomenon. We also see it for adults, right? So what satisfies those things? I think that the biggest change for that population is the screens.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
We hold these in our pocket. They shift what we do every day. But the trick there is to how do we understand, well, this would obviously affect the lowest performers and have relatively small effects on the upper performers. Now, look, I think that could possibly happen. I would think that, you know, we've talked about the decline of reading.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think a lot of the rise of phones has been a displacement of what might have been reading and other kinds of activities. And that displacement may have a greater effect on lower performers who might not already be engaged in cognitively stimulating alternatives. And it may be that higher performers still maintain some of that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And so sort of the effect of screens, they just have some insulation or a buffer against that. But that's still conjecture. But I don't see anything else out there that has the explanatory power to explain this big of a fall over this period.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So I think there's a lot to like about that explanation. And look, I think there's multiple causes here. And I just think that this is clearly a big one. I think part of this can be displacement. But I think another part of this is not only the screens as taking up our time, but also how they're taking up our time.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So I think that if you just look at the way we interact with screens over this past decade compared to the decade before that, the algorithm is just a big functionality to reduce our concentration time on anything, right? We're just looking at smaller chunks of coherent information. And this sort of fits with the trend away from, well, you don't need to read the whole book.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
We'll read excerpts of it. Or we can do this in smaller, faster chunks because we need to be on something else. And that sort of harnessing of the attention economy. is something that I think does take place.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And that's another factor that I think could divide against the higher performers and maybe not have as much of a deleterious effect on their scores and cognition as the lower performers who could be continuing to fall victim of that. The worst thing about that is it could continue to get worse. I don't see that as being a sort of self-moderating or self-constrained phenomenon.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, I mean, for me, look, I'm kind of a data guy. That's my zone that I work in, but here I'm just gonna drop that and go completely subjective here. You know, the ability to concentrate and embody a topic and to be conversant with it and to create within that space is productive. And most of the other short concentration pieces are consumption-oriented.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And I want to, you know, I'm a conservative. I'm going to stand a thwart history and yell stop on this one. I would rather have people who are more engaged and have an ability to engage at a deeper level. And I think that's the direction we want to head in. And, you know, we got to resist the candy. What's the cause for optimism here?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yeah, I think there's reason to be optimistic on the literacy front. I think that there's a lot of change that could be made. I mean, to put a pessimistic tone on it, it may be because we haven't been doing a whole lot of excellent education for a while. So there's a lot of room to grow. But I do think that there are changes that we can make.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I don't have a lot of positive yarn to spin on this, though, I'll tell you. And the reason is, you know, look back at our conversation. We've talked about some policies and we're a little bit iffy. And then we talk about sort of the cultural things. And culture eats policy for breakfast every day. And if we sort of attend to this, like, well, what should we do with our schools to fix this up?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think we're really missing something. the problem that we need to address. And the fact that adults, and this isn't just some adults, right? When I talk about these adults, it's 16 to 65. It's the whole nation being affected by this. I really think that we have to understand this as a much broader force and treat it as such. Otherwise, we're just going to be victims of it.