Student Scores Hit Historic Lows.
The AFT Head Spent the Week Ranting About Trump.

• 14712th-grade NAEP mathSeptember 9, 2025 — lowest since the assessment began in 2005
• 45%12th graders below Basic in mathhighest percentage ever recorded — NAGB, Sept. 2025
• $31Tlifetime earnings lossStanford's Hanushek & Strauss — pandemic learning loss, US students
• $90Tcompounded decade lossEdNext / The 74 — compounded lifetime cost of the decade-long decline

On September 9, 2025, the National Assessment Governing Board released the latest Nation’s Report Card. Twelfth-grade math had fallen to 147 — the lowest since the assessment began in 2005. Twelfth-grade reading dropped to 283, the lowest in more than three decades. 45 percent of high-school seniors scored below NAEP Basic in math — the highest percentage ever recorded. Thirty-two percent fell below Basic in reading — also a record. Eighth-grade science dropped four points since 2019. Earlier in the year, the January 29, 2025 release had already shown 33 percent of 8th graders below Basic in reading (largest ever) and 40 percent of 4th graders below Basic in reading (highest since 2002).

As Catherine Salgado documented at PJ Media on May 17, 2026, the response of Randi Weingarten (D) — president of the American Federation of Teachers since 2008, a union whose own internal communications with the CDC have been scrutinized by House Oversight — was to spend the past week posting on Bluesky. Not about reading scores. Not about math scores. Not about science. About Trump’s immigration policy. About DACA. About SCOTUS and gerrymandering. About voting rights. Weingarten left X in January 2026 and now posts from @rweingarten.bsky.social.

What the silence on test scores costs is itself a measurable figure. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss calculated in a 2024 working paper that pandemic learning loss alone equates to $31 trillion in lost lifetime US earnings — roughly $70,000 per student. The 74 / EdNext estimates the compounded decade-long decline at $90 trillion in forgone future GDP growth. The COVID school-closure period that AFT and Weingarten lobbied to extend cost roughly fifteen times the entire pandemic recession in human capital. Then, in September 2025, Weingarten released a book titled “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.”

The Nation’s Report Card — administered by the U.S. Department of Education’s independent National Assessment Governing Board — is the benchmark for academic achievement in the United States. Two NAEP releases in 2025 documented the worst results in the program’s history across multiple subjects and grade levels.

“Today's NAEP results confirm a devastating trend: American students are testing at historic lows across all of K-12. Nearly half of America's high school seniors are testing at below basic levels in math and reading.”

Sec. Linda McMahon (R) · U.S. Dept. of Education statement · September 9, 2025

“A line can be drawn between these falling scores, and the fact that the Biden-Harris administration colluded with teachers' unions to keep schools shuttered long after public health officials said they could be reopened.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Chair, Senate HELP Committee · January 29, 2025

In the week leading up to May 17, 2026 — as the latest scores continued to circulate among researchers and policymakers — the president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers posted on the social network Bluesky, where she migrated after leaving X in January 2026. Catherine Salgado at PJ Media surveyed those posts. None addressed the test scores. The topics, in Weingarten’s own words:

The pattern is the entire feed, not a curated sample. When the head of the second-largest American teachers’ union posts during the worst NAEP results in the assessment’s history, and immigration enforcement and gerrymandering are her chosen topics, the absence of education content is itself the editorial fact.

The score collapse did not begin in 2025. Its roots are documented in House Oversight’s April 2023 hearing, in which AFT President Weingarten testified about the union’s contacts with the Biden-era CDC under Director Rochelle Walenskyon school-reopening guidance. Internal emails, released by the Committee, showed AFT staff recommending edits to CDC guidance — edits that ultimately appeared in the final document. AFT later denied that this constituted “conspiring” with the CDC; Committee documents characterized it as “uncommon influence.”

Local officials in Democratic-run cities have since gone on the record. Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) — who fought the Chicago Teachers Union throughout 2020 and 2021 over reopening — has summarized the experience plainly.

“The union needed to work with us and they never did that.”

Lori Lightfoot (D), former Mayor of Chicago · on teachers' union COVID-era school reopening

Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) led the federal Department of Education from 2021 through 2025 during the period now identified by NAEP as the steepest sustained decline in modern American achievement testing. He has not publicly resigned that record.

Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) — chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — issued subpoenas to AFT during the panel’s investigation. The final 520-page report documented the interaction between AFT, the CDC, and the Biden White House on reopening guidance in detail. Education Week, citing primary documents, reported the union’s denials alongside the documentary record showing language adopted from union submissions verbatim.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — now chair of the Senate HELP Committee — issued his January 29, 2025 statement in response to the NAEP release of that same date. He named the union explicitly. So did Secretary Linda McMahon (R), confirmed as Trump’s second-term Education Secretary in 2025.

“I don't think anyone can look at the scores that we have seen this year… and [think] that we were not failing our students. We need a hard reset in education in this country.”

Sec. Linda McMahon (R) · U.S. Dept. of Education

The cost of a single year of lost learning, applied at scale, is not abstract. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek — one of the most cited education-economics scholars alive — and co-author Bradley Strauss calculated in a 2024 Stanford working paper that pandemic-era learning loss equates to $31 trillion in lost lifetime US earnings, or roughly $70,000 per student. The 74 / EdNext put the compounded effect of the broader decade-long decline at $90 trillion in forgone future GDP growth.

In September 2025 — the same month the worst 12th-grade NAEP numbers in two decades were released — Weingarten published a book with Beacon Press titled “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.”The Rolling Stone excerpt and the publisher’s own jacket copy frame the argument plainly:

“Attacks on schools and teachers have long been a hallmark of fascist regimes… Fascists fear teachers because teachers foster an educated and empowered population that can see past propaganda and scare tactics.”

Randi Weingarten, 'Why Fascists Fear Teachers' (Beacon Press, Sept. 2025) — Rolling Stone excerpt

On the Trump administration’s January 2025 executive order expanding federal support for school choice, AFT’s official press release — under Weingarten’s name — described the order in the following terms:

“A ham-fisted, recycled, and likely illegal scheme to diminish choice and deny classrooms resources to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”

Randi Weingarten (D), AFT President · AFT press release on Trump school-choice executive order

President Donald Trump (R) has continued to back school-choice expansions at the state level from his own Truth Social account, including direct endorsements of legislation in Tennessee and Idaho.