American schoolchildren’s math and reading scores saw “a marked decline” — again — falling further behind their own scores before the COVID-era lockdowns, trailing even more foreign nations, and fueling calls for President-elect Donald Trump to reform or abolish the Department of Education.

American students participate in two international tests — the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) — at ages nine and 13. American fourth graders scored 18 points lower in the 2022-2023 school year than in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic closures. Eighth graders’ scores fell by 27 points over the same period.

Struggling students suffered the most. “U.S. students at the lower end of the achievement scale, specifically those in the 10th and 25th percentiles in 4th- and 8th-grade mathematics, as well in 4th-grade science, had lower scores in 2023 than in 2019,” reported TIMSS. “Additionally, for U.S. 4th-graders in mathematics, 2023 marked the lowest score at the 10th and 25th percentiles since TIMSS began in 1995.”

Fourth graders earned the lowest science scores since the TIMSS test was first offered in 1995.

“I wish I were surprised, but this is yet another study of student performance that in the history of the Department of Education has showed a fairly steady decline — a marked decline here in these years,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Thursday. “These most recent years, we’ve had some blips of recovery over the history of the department. But in general, student performance is in decline.”

The results dovetail with a test that examines only U.S. students. “The nation’s report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s long-term trend (LTT), revealed that scores for nine-year-old students fell by five points in reading and seven points in math early in the 2022-2023 school year as compared to 2020; 13-year-old students’ scores declined by another four points in reading and nine points in math in diagnostic tests administered this fall.

American teens’ reading score was only one point higher than in 1971.

“Parents will be blamed for this. The students themselves will be blamed for this. The administrators will say, ‘We need more social emotional learning money. We need more money to address this problem.’ And the department’s never had any more money,” said Kilgannon, who served as director of the U.S. Department of Education’s office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives during the first Trump administration.

Analysts greeted the overall trend revealed by the tests with alarm: While other nations improved their scores during this time, American students fell further behind. In all, 26 nations, including Turkey and Romania, scored higher than American nine-year-olds in math and one, Portugal, tied. U.S. fourth graders excelled 35 nations.

Sweden leapfrogged American fourth graders in math, climbing 10 spots ahead of the U.S. in 2023.

The results raise a debate over nations’ relative handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sweden took a hands-off approach to COVID-19, keeping schools open for children through the age of 16 and ending remote learning for older students by June 2020. Even as some areas in Sweden banned the use of face masks, 0.0000077% of Swedish children went to intensive care units with COVID, and the nation’s suicide rate remained unchanged.

Americans’ mental and physical health deteriorated during government-enforced lockdowns, and adolescent suicide rates soared. “Long Term School Closures Were Not Supported by Available Science and Evidence,” concluded a thorough congressional report on the coronavirus released this week.

“No question, if you’re not in school, it’s going to affect you,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. But being in a school that teaches radical ideology can be worse yet. “During the Biden administration in our public schools, they’ve been focusing on the bathrooms. They’ve been focusing on transgendering our children,” said Perkins. “And so this all adds up: You fail on the basics when you focus on this nonsense.”

“The problem is the educational-industrial complex — the blob — the people who are administrators, who are all about the ideological parts of the school system and not so much about the performance parts of the school system,” agreed Kilgannon.

The 2024 election proved that parents are taking control of their children’s education and dethroning ideologues who see the public schools as a pathway of indoctrination. In Chino Valley Unified School District, all three open seats went to conservative, pro-family candidates: John Andrew Cervants, Andrew Cruz, and James Na. Each won his race with 58% to 64% of the vote.

Nearby Temecula Valley Unified school board President Joseph Komrosky, whom voters recalled in June, won a seat on the same board in a race just conceded this Monday.

“God has called me to protect the innocence of these children, and I represent the values of the parents of the community that elected me,” said Komrosky in a Facebook video late last month. “This swearing-in, I’ll do the same thing I swore to do the first time: If the schools are doing well, great, I’m happy, and if they’re not, I’m going to hold people accountable.”

Statewide, voters elected at least 34 pro-parental rights candidates to school board seats, according to the California Family Council.

“Even in deep-blue states like California, we see Christians running for school board winning their elections and demanding things like parental notification if your child goes to school and claims that they are a different gender identity. Simply notifying parents about that is not something that most people find controversial,” Kilgannon told Perkins. “That is, of course, not the situation in California right now.”

“Parents are fed up, and they are starting to engage,” Kilgannon said. “The whole work of childhood is to develop you as the person God has called you to be. Develop yourself that way and you do that with your parents, and your teachers are supposed to be helping along in that process as partners.”

At the same time, President-elect Trump has vowed to abolish the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), founded by Jimmy Carter in 1979. He and others have asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to pare back, or “delete,” the DOE, which critics view as a Democratic gift to teachers’ unions. When Musk and Ramaswamy visited Capitol Hill to discuss DOGE’s plans with legislators on Thursday, the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), recommended that they give special attention to the Education Department.

But in the end, no federal or state agency can simultaneously cultivate children’s God-given talents and elevate their moral character if Christians refuse to do so, Kilgannon contended.

“It’s really wonderful that we will have an opportunity to have a reset with the Trump administration, but in the end, this is a problem of education that is controlled at the state and local level in the United States. And it is more important than ever for Christians to be involved in the public school system and for us as citizens to want excellent schools.”

“Our children deserve that,” Kilgannon concluded. “And they are being robbed of it right now.”