- Two Ivy League professors projected that American students will lose nearly $1 trillion in cumulative lifetime income because of the nation’s dramatic learning decline.
- That projection is based on National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) data showing that every state saw a decline in its math scores, while September data demonstrated that reading scores regressed to 1991 levels after the COVID-19 pandemic.
- “We interpret this evidence as saying that NAEP means something,” Douglas O. Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth, told The 74, a nonprofit news organization focused on education. “When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life. And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.”
