Well, that was ugly.

The new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results were released last week, and they continue the grim story they’ve been telling for over a decade.

Fourth- and 8th-grade reading scores declined again. Between 2019 and 2024, 4th-grade reading is down (significantly or otherwise) in every state but Louisiana and Alabama. Among 8th graders, fewer than one-in-three students were “proficient” readers. Thirty-three percent were “below basic.”

On math, 4th graders ticked up two points since 2022. But that doesn’t even get them back to where they were in 2019. Eighth-grade math scores dropped in every state but Tennessee between 2019 and 2024. And those 2019 scores already reflected a half-decade-long swoon.

The bottom line is that student achievement has been declining for over a decade. Meanwhile, Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at American Institutes for Research, noted, “The distance between the highest/lowest performing students is a chasm & achievement gaps are at historic highs . . . These results are a five-alarm fire for our education system, not just another data point or a temporary COVID effect.”

Now, I’m not diving into the weeds of state-to-state comparisons or the like. For one thing, there are others in the EdNext family (Marty West, Checker Finn) far better equipped to do so.  For another, there are a lot of possible explanations for this lost academic decade. It’s pretty clear cell phones and social media have exacted a real cost. Pandemic-related disruptions cast a huge shadow. But I want to touch on something else: how, over the past decade or two, those who lead and train educators got fixated on quasi-mystical fever dreams. This had dire consequences on the things that schools can and should do well.

Back in 1993, the late, great Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, author of The Limits of Social Policy, sought to explain the precipitous decline of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. He observed:

New York stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do. The things a city can do include keeping its streets and bridges in repair, building new facilities to accommodate new needs and a shifting population, picking up the garbage, and policing the public environment. Among the things it can’t do are redistributing income on a large scale and solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior.

The TL;DR summary: City leaders had decided their jobs just weren’t big or meaningful enough.

It strikes me that this captures much of the past decade-plus in education. In that time, a whole swath of intellectuals, advocates, and funders concluded that things like orderly classrooms, academic rigor, outcome accountability, gifted education, and even numeracy were overrated. Educators were subjected to constant treatises, lectures, and trainings that explained such concerns were outdated and oppressive. As someone who’s long been involved in school leadership training, dating back to well before I penned Cage-Busting Leadership, I watched this play out from the front row.

The measure of a school leader gradually became a willingness to parrot the tenets of social justice. Professional developers urged teachers to deconstruct privilege, be on the lookout for microaggressions, and do their best to combat climate change. The grandiose ambitions and amorphous directives came at the expense of more prosaic concerns. After all, time devoted to gender unicorns or interrogating privilege is time not spent on science or math. And the associated doctrines undermine academic pursuits.

No Child Left Behind plays a role in this story, I think, but not due to the simple insistence (fashionable in some quarters) that the NAEP data shows NCLB kinda, sorta “worked.” Look, between 2002 and 2010, NCLB’s regimen of testing and accountability did indeed create a climate in which schools worked harder to ensure that more students could read and do math. This had some real benefits. But the emphasis on “gap-closing” had real costs, too, as schools narrowed curricula and embraced test prep while public officials did their best to game the numbers. The result was public distrust, anti-testing backlash, and a demand that schools stop “treating students like widgets.”

That could’ve led to a healthy shift.

It didn’t.

What it did was open the door for ed-school radicals and assorted grifters to ply their wares. Social and emotional learning served as a case study in allowing the righteous to displace the routine. Launched decades before by advocates who billed it as a way to equip students for academic success, it was overrun by ideologues eager to harness it to bespoke agendas.

Educators were told that traditional grading was suspect. They were told that discipline was oppressive and urged to shift from “punitive” practices to more “restorative” models. They were told that testing was inhuman and unfair. They were told that multimedia literacy was just as important as textual literacy. They were told that phonics instruction was constricting and unnecessary. They were told that content knowledge was overrated, that students could always “look things up.”

The irony? When traditional norms erode, the biggest losers are the students who aren’t getting structure, discipline, or high expectations at home. It’s no surprise that our NAEP woes have been most pronounced among low-achievers.

School leaders and teacher trainers need to refocus on things that schools can do as opposed to things (like ending injustice or combating climate change) they really can’t. That means setting clear guidance for students and teachers. Maintain order and address misbehavior. Encourage rigor and cultivate high expectations. Ensure that instructional time is used effectively. This stuff is hard work, and it may not be emotionally fulfilling for those seeking a quixotic crusade. I get that. But ensuring that students are numerate, literate, and academically successful is priority one for schools. It’s their unique responsibility and something they can actually do.

Back in 1993, Glazer concluded his talk by insisting that cities can restore competent government if only the citizens demand it. As if to prove his point, New York City’s remarkable resurgence arguably started that same year. But it required civic leaders to ditch euphemisms, aspirational blather, and virtue signaling and to embrace the gritty, day-to-day work of keeping cities clean, safe, and functional. In fairly brutal fashion, the NAEP results pose the question of whether we have the stomach to do what it’ll take to turn around our struggling schools.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”