The latest results from the country’s longest-running educational gauge deliver a split verdict: the youngest students tested are climbing out of the pandemic’s academic hole, while the teenagers just ahead of them remain stuck. The findings, drawn from the 2025 Long-Term Trend assessment released June 10 by the National Center for Education Statistics, offer the clearest national signal yet that recovery is real for some students and elusive for others.
What the Numbers Show
The assessment, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, tested more than 30,000 students between October 2024 and March 2025. Nine-year-olds posted average gains of about 4 points in both reading and math compared with 2022, the last time the age group sat the exam. The improvement reached across the performance spectrum, with the lowest-scoring students making notable strides rather than the gains concentrating only at the top.
Thirteen-year-olds moved in the opposite direction, or rather did not move at all. Their 2025 scores showed no statistically significant change from 2023 in either subject, and both remained below their pre-pandemic 2020 levels. The longer arc is starker. Between 2012 and 2025, average scores for 13-year-olds fell by 7 points in reading and 15 points in math on the assessment’s 500-point scale, erasing the record highs the age group set earlier in the 2010s.
Two Cohorts, Two Pandemic Experiences
The divergence tracks closely with how old each group was when schools shut down. The 9-year-olds tested in 2025 were just entering elementary school when buildings reopened, early enough to benefit from a national push on foundational reading and recovery resources. The 13-year-olds were acquiring core reading and math skills when the disruption hit, and the data suggests that lost ground has not been recovered as they moved into middle school.
Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, framed the younger results as encouraging, pointing to broad-based improvement that included students performing below average. Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, credited part of the reading gains to a nationwide focus on early literacy, while cautioning that the stagnation among teens demands urgency rather than patience.
The results also carried an uneven internal story. Among 9-year-olds, the overall improvement was driven largely by boys, who gained roughly 7 points in reading and 5 in math, while girls improved by a single point in reading and 3 in math. Demographic groups otherwise followed broadly similar trajectories.
A Sharp Drop in Reading for Fun
Beyond the test scores, an accompanying student survey surfaced a finding that education officials called among the most concerning. The share of students who said they read for fun almost every day has collapsed over the long run. In 2025, only 37 percent of 9-year-olds and 14 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for pleasure that often. Four decades earlier, those figures peaked at 53 percent and 35 percent.
Julia Rafal-Baer, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, connected the decline to the spread of smartphones and social media and argued for a direct response, saying educators have “got to put real books back into kids’ hands.” The survey also captured a persistent attendance problem: the proportion of 13-year-olds absent at least one day a month climbed from 44 percent in 2012 to 61 percent in 2025.
How the Test Fits the Broader Picture
The Long-Term Trend assessment is distinct from the better-known Nation’s Report Card. It has tracked 9- and 13-year-olds by age rather than grade since the early 1970s, is still administered on paper, and repeats many of the same questions across decades, which makes it a stable yardstick for change over time. It does not report state-level results.
That long baseline puts the 2025 figures in context. The 9-year-olds’ reading score now sits above where the age group stood in 1971, and their math score reflects steady progress across more than 50 years of testing. The 13-year-olds’ reading score, by contrast, was not meaningfully different from the 1971 result, a flat half-century for the older cohort even as the younger one advanced.
The findings also complicate a gloomier national narrative. Recent assessments, including the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, have described a “reading recession,” with continued declines in fourth-grade reading and little growth in math. The new long-term data suggests the trajectory is not uniform, and that the earliest grades may be where intervention is gaining traction.
For policymakers and districts, the report sets up a pointed question heading into the next school year: what is working for the youngest students, and why it is not reaching the teenagers who need it most. Officials stopped short of declaring the recovery secure, noting that a single encouraging release does not reverse more than a decade of slippage among older students.
