Nebraska's assessment trends don't exist in isolation. Nationally, researchers have documented a striking pattern: across all 50 states, NAEP scores in Math and Reading rose steadily for years — then plateaued and declined in alignment with each state's large-scale digital adoption, not with a single calendar year. This staggered policy adoption design provides strong evidence that the timing of digital lock-in, not external factors, drives the shift.
The charts below show national NAEP averages aligned to each state's digital inflection point (Year 0). These results cannot be attributed to COVID because Year 0 for every state occurred before the pandemic and 2022 data was excluded entirely. Unlike most "standardized" educational assessments that periodically reset their scoring scales, NAEP has remained anchored to its original 1992 scale, meaning these declines reflect genuine losses in student learning, not adjustments to the test.
