Recommendations

What leaders should investigate next

1. Why reading specifically kept falling. Math has stabilized or recovered, but reading has not. Leaders should look at instructional time, home literacy environments, and reading policy to understand the difference.
2. What is driving Texas's earlier and steeper decline. Texas was losing ground before COVID. That points to state-specific factors worth a closer look.
3. Whether the same pattern holds at the district level. The national and state averages hide wide variation; a district-level look (using SEDA or state test data) would reveal where recovery is and is not happening.

What additional data should be collected

• District- and school-level assessment results to see beneath the state averages.
• Longitudinal, individual-student data to follow the same students over time (which NAEP cannot do).
• Contextual data on attendance, instructional time, and intervention programs.

What interventions might be considered — carefully

Reading recovery programs, tutoring targeted at the students who fell furthest, and monitoring of grade 8 math readiness. These are suggestions to evaluate, not prescriptions — this project cannot say which interventions work.

What questions should not be answered from this dataset alone

• "What caused the decline?" — NAEP data cannot answer this.
• "Which individual students need help?" — NAEP has no individual scores.
• "Which schools are failing?" — NAEP reports no school-level results.

What future analysis would strengthen the project

A controlled comparison that adjusts for demographic composition, an interrupted time-series design that models the pre-COVID trend as a counterfactual, and a predictive model only at the aggregate (state/region) level with the safeguards described in responsible use.