California students continue to trail their peers across the country in two key subjects on the newly released national report card.

Testing data released Wednesday reveals that, overall, students across the country have not recouped pandemic learning loss in math and reading. California students’ recovery has been especially slow according to data from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

California’s fourth graders scored an average of 233 on a 500-point scale in math and 212 in reading, compared nationally to 237 in math and 215 in reading. California’s eighth graders scored an average of 269 in math and 254 in reading, compared to the national averages of 272 and 256.

Among the data’s most alarming findings is the staggeringly large gap in performance between California’s socioeconomically disadvantaged students and more affluent students, the widest in the country behind only Massachusetts.

“This year’s ‘Nation’s Report Card’ is one California should be ashamed of,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of policy for students from transitional kindergarten through 12th grade at EdTrust-West, an Oakland-based education research and advocacy group. “The pace of progress for Californian students of color is not just slow, it’s stopped altogether.”

California’s results reveal that disadvantaged students — students that qualify for free or reduced lunch, among other factors — scored an average of 31 points lower in 4th grade math and reading, an average of 28 points lower in 8th grade reading and 39 points lower in 8th grade math, persistent gaps similar to assessment results from the late 1990s.

Separately, the report examined performance gaps between Black and Hispanic students and White students and found they were also shockingly large. Black students scored between 22 and 40 points lower than White students, while Hispanic students scored between 24 and 34 points lower.

The Nation’s Report Card is a nationwide assessment of students’ academic performance in reading and math, based on what they should know and are able to do according to grade-level standards. The test is administered to a sample of a state’s fourth graders and eighth graders every two years. While the data includes some district-level breakdowns, district-level data is not available for the Bay Area.

Alix Gallagher, interim managing director at the Policy Analysis for California Education, an education research and policy organization, said the assessment is the best general measure educators, policy experts and state leaders have to gauge student performance across the country because it’s a broader snapshot of progress and, unlike state testing, teachers aren’t focused on preparing students for the assessment.

The test results reveal that while California made modest gains in shrinking the gap between the state’s scores and the nationwide averages, the state’s gains were largely driven by higher-performing students.

The new data paints a very similar picture to state testing results released in the fall that revealed that California students have recovered from the pandemic at a much slower rate than other states, despite significant state and federal resources to aid students’ learning recovery, causing outrage among educators and experts.

“Anyone looking at these results should be asking what California has been doing for 25 years and why it hasn’t worked,” said Wheatfall-Lum.

Gallagher said students’ poor performance could also be linked to the way California schools are funded. Unlike other states, most schools in California receive funding based on average daily attendance, so when students skip class, schools get less funding. Districts that don’t rely on daily attendance get most of their funding from property taxes and tend to be in higher-wealth areas, which Gallagher said could be one reason for the stark gap between socioeconomically disadvantaged students and more affluent students.

And chronic absenteeism, combined with declining enrollment and the end of pandemic recovery funding, has left districts across the state facing huge budget cuts and strained resources, Gallagher said, and will likely lead to additional drops in student performance.

“I don’t know that there’s any reason to think that with the decline in resources, we’ll even be able to maintain the small gains that we’ve had,” she said. “To actually get to where we want to be, we need pretty dramatic shifts in districts’ abilities to improve the quality of instruction so that students learn more.”

California is ranked in the bottom 15 states and territories for 4th grade math and reading. Gallagher said that other states in the country take a much larger role in managing districts and improving the quality of instruction — something that California leaves up to school districts to decide for themselves.

Nationwide, the drop in students’ performance has led some education leaders to wonder about students’ mobile phone use and their sharp decline in reading skills.

Martin West, a Harvard professor and member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the testing, said in a news conference Wednesday about the reports that students’ frequent use of social media and lack of reading outside of class is worth studying.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has expressed concerns over student cellphone use in recent months and signed a law in the fall that will require California school districts to limit student smartphone use during the school day by July 2026.

The U.S. Department of Education released a statement Wednesday following the release of the national test results criticizing the nation’s education system for continuing to “fail students.”

“Today’s NAEP results reveal a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears,” the department said. “Not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind.”