Public schools in five of the nation’s most densely populated cities are spending billions of local, state, and federal tax dollars, but students are learning less compared to where they were five years ago, according to results reported in the 2025 edition of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

The NAEP — also known as “The Nation’s Report Card” since passage of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 — measures student learning in math and reading at the fourth, eighth, and 12th grade levels. The five school districts examined by The Washington Stand include the New York City Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, Houston Independent School District, and the School District of Philadelphia. Phoenix has a larger population than Philadelphia, but it has dozens of small districts rather than one large district encompassing all or most of the city limits.

Collectively, the five big-city districts’ student enrollment exceeds 1.9 million. The total of federal tax dollars in 2024 to the five districts is $25.7 billion, for an average of $13,116 per student, and enough to fund five NASA Artemis II-like missions to the moon and back. When all funding sources are included, the overall average spending per-pupil increases to $26,578, which is 50.6% above the national average per-pupil spending of $17,644.

The average teacher salary for the five districts is $94,271, compared to the national average of $74,495. The average salary of the big-city administrators is $110,515, with the national average of $117,000. All of the teachers in the five districts are represented by unions, with most covered by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and a portion of the Los Angeles teachers by the National Education Association (NEA).

So, per-pupil spending in the five districts is significantly above the national average, as are teacher salaries, and yet, as the following data make clear, hundreds of thousands of students in those schools are not learning at even the basic proficiency level in math and reading for eighth graders.

The scores for New York City public schools show 49% of eighth graders tested at or below the most basic proficiency level in math, as did 38% on reading proficiency. For Los Angeles eighth graders, the scores were 54% at or below basic proficiency in math and 42% for reading proficiency.

Chicago’s eighth graders turned in scores of 51% at or below basic proficiency for math and 37% for reading proficiency. In Houston, the scores were 51% at or below basic proficiency in math and 44% in reading. For Philadelphia, the scores were 62% at or below basic proficiency in math and 50% in reading.

Overall, as a group, these five big city school districts thus averaged having 53%, or more than half of their eighth-graders at or below basic proficiency in math and 42% at or below basic proficiency in reading. By comparison, the average for all large cities, according to the NAEP, shows 48% at or below proficient among eighth graders on math and 39% at or below among eighth graders in reading.

Since all of these data are for eighth graders, it raises the question of whether their substantial lack of learning might be eliminated by the time they reach the 12th grade. But the 12th grade scores show negligible changes. In New York, for example, 49% of the 12th graders were still at or below basic proficiency in 2024. 

Sadly, the bad news is not limited to these five large metropolises, according to NAEP’s own analyses. Learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic that kept students at home for much of 2020-21 are accelerating nationwide rather than declining.

“As a nation, U.S. students have not recovered from the devastating impact the pandemic had on education. National scores are below pre-pandemic levels (2019) in ALL tested grades and subjects. Higher-performing students drove most of the progress made in 2024. Gaps are growing between higher-performing and lower-performing students — a trend we’ve been seeing for more than a decade. Just how big is this gap? On a 500-point scale, the lowest-performing students generally score about 100 points below the highest-performing students in 2024,” NAEP observed in its “10 Takeaways” analysis.

How serious is the situation? The same takeaways analysis noted that “reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grades. No state saw reading gains in either grade, compared to 2022. A third (33%) of eighth graders are not even reading at the NAEP Basic level — a greater percentage than ever before. Which means, a third of eighth graders likely could not identify basic literary elements in a text such as the order of events, character traits, and main idea.”

On the eighth grade math scores, the takeaways analysis pointed out that “in fourth grade, math scores are up nationally by two points. While this is promising, middle- and higher-performing students drove the progress. Scores for lower-performing students were flat. In eighth grade, math scores are flat nationally, which is of particular concern given the historic eight-point drop for eighth graders in 2022. Unfortunately, that overall flatness masks higher-performing students’ gains in 2024 and lower-performing students’ declines.”

An inherent limitation of the NAEP data, however, is that it is a snapshot in time from one year to the next rather than tracking the same students over a length of time, as is the case with “longitudinal” data analyses, according to Jonathan Butcher, the acting director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

“If it doesn’t say it’s longitudinal, then it’s not. Even if they have results going back for several years, they are just monitoring the different kids in those grades from year-to-year. So, it’s important when looking at the results to say this is not the same population of kids, this is a new population of kids. So, what that tells us for those grades is [that] the results are consistently poor. The schools on a consistent basis are failing to live up to the expectations we have set for them,” Butcher told The Washington Stand. “It’s also important to note that this downturn happened before COVID, and so those from the unions who would say this is all because of COVID, we’re just trying to make up ground here. No, no, things were going bad before COVID, since 2009.”

The data for these five big-city public school districts suggests that there is little correlation of per-pupil spending and teacher salaries with academic proficiency. And a 2023 analysis by the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University concludes the lack of correlation is also evident among school districts at all spending levels.

“The experience of U.S. states since 2003 offers a cautionary lesson: Rising per-pupil education spending has not been reliably correlated with higher NAEP student achievement. Even among the highest-spending jurisdictions in 2022 — such as New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey — academic outcomes have been mixed at best, and in many cases worse than two decades earlier,” wrote authors Dennis W. Jansen and Somali Ghosh Sinha.

“These results do not imply that education funding is unimportant. Rather, they emphasize that the returns to spending depend critically on how resources are used. Differences in instructional quality, curriculum rigor, administrative efficiency, student demographics, policy choices, and societal changes are all candidates for explaining the low correlation between educational spending and educational achievement,” they said.