High-School Graduate ACT Scores Drop to 30-Year Low
Students who graduated high school this year performed worse on the ACT standardized test on average than any previous class for the past 30 years, in yet another sign of the lingering toll of pandemic-era school shutdowns.
According to the ACT’s findings, more than 40 percent of seniors did not meet any “of the college-readiness benchmarks.” Conversely, only 22 percent of 2022 high-school senior test takers met “all four benchmarks” linked to the academic disciplines the ACT tests: science, reading, math, and English.
“This is the fifth consecutive year of declines in average scores, a worrisome trend that began long before the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has persisted,” said ACT CEO Janet Godwin. “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure.”
The news speaks to a broader trend of declining academic attainment rates across the United States, not all of which stems from lingering pandemic-era restrictions, Godwin argued.
“These declines are not simply a byproduct of the pandemic. They are further evidence of longtime systemic failures that were exacerbated by the pandemic. A return to the pre-pandemic status quo would be insufficient and a disservice to students and educators. These systemic failures require sustained collective action and support for the academic recovery of high-school students as an urgent national priority and imperative,” Godwin explained.
Teachers’ unions were among the most vocal proponents of school shutdowns throughout the pandemic. This January, more than a million of the nation’s 50 million public school students were kept home by recalcitrant union bosses. National Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten was one of the leading voices pushing for school closures throughout the pandemic and as recently as early this year, though she has since tried to distance herself from that position.
Despite widespread vaccinations and limited in-school transmission of COVID-19, many union leaders remain unmoved. An extensive body of research shows that remote learning negatively impacts children’s learning, widening existing “income and racial disparities.”
This September results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which dubs itself the “nation’s report card,” registered plummeting math and reading scores amongst elementary school children. It was the first ever score drop among nine-year-olds since it was first administered in 1973.
Some states have sought to ban standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT altogether in the name of equity and inclusion. The University of California (UC) system declared admissions to be henceforth “test-free,” a move that critics have argued is part of an effort to surreptitiously adjust the racial makeup of the student population by reducing the number of Asians and increasing the number of black and Hispanic students.
Shortly, the U.S. Supreme Court will be deliberating on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard to determine whether the latter implemented a race-based determinant in college admissions. MIT overturned its earlier decision to discontinue standardized testing upon realizing that requiring it was “more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”
The ACTs are administered every year. Roughly 1.3 million seniors wrote the ACT in 2022 comprising over a third of recent American graduates. The average Composite 2022 score was 19.8, down from 20.3 a year ago.
