I never said it was the only cause. Ignoring it completely as a cause at all is both unscientific and bad reporting when it affects 1 in 5 households with kids.
I don’t think it’s a compelling narrative, because of the timing. Scores dropped from 2015 to 2019 even as food insecurity continued to go down from its 2008 peak:
And the test scores rebounded somewhat even as food security support was abruptly yanked from the poorest families in the years after COVID, and food insecurity increased while scores rebounded a bit.
And unfortunately, USDA stopped collecting the data in 2025 so we’re gonna be in the dark on the precise numbers and trendlines after 2024, but looking at that chart and comparing it to the literacy/math dropoff in the original article, it’s hard to draw the conclusion from the data that food security played a major role in this trendline.
I never said it was the only cause. Ignoring it completely as a cause at all is both unscientific and bad reporting when it affects 1 in 5 households with kids.
I don’t think it’s a compelling narrative, because of the timing. Scores dropped from 2015 to 2019 even as food insecurity continued to go down from its 2008 peak:
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/food-insecurity-rises-for-the-second-year-in-a-row
And the test scores rebounded somewhat even as food security support was abruptly yanked from the poorest families in the years after COVID, and food insecurity increased while scores rebounded a bit.
And unfortunately, USDA stopped collecting the data in 2025 so we’re gonna be in the dark on the precise numbers and trendlines after 2024, but looking at that chart and comparing it to the literacy/math dropoff in the original article, it’s hard to draw the conclusion from the data that food security played a major role in this trendline.