Scores for Adults Are Dropping on Tests of Basic Skills
A connection with declining scores for kids?
It’s tempting to link the decline in adult scores to the parallel phenomenon in student scores—especially since the U.S. scores are all announced by the same federal education official, Peggy Carr, whose job requires coming up with new ways to describe depressing data.
Carr said the adult scores show there’s a “dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills,” with “more adults clustered at the bottom”—just as with kids in both reading and math. On the 2023 adult tests, the US, along with Singapore, displayed the “largest skills inequalities in literacy and numeracy” among the countries that participated.
