Grade level comprehension is an expectation set by the state. Having some standard to aim for gives us a better understanding of if students are generally regressing or progressing.

We're able to see tread lines over time, and raise alarms like this headline, when we know that students now are not learning as much as students of the past.

No, it's a standard that is based on what a child should be able to perform at a certain age. Otherwise everyone could get exceptionally dumb and illiterate, which has already happened in CA apparently. As someone who went to CA public school, I can tell you that very little learning is going on (at least where I was).

I think it is defined by the aspirational median student.

I presume "grade level" was defined by the median student some time ago and has not been adjusted since. The fact that it's going down seems like bad news.

It’s not really going down. There are years it was worse and years it was better. It seems like it’s staying fairly consistent around the original threshold, which appears to be close the median. But I’d note the first year observed was lower than this last year observed, so it couldn’t have been the actual median. They probably intentionally picked a level below the median as the threshold to convince people to freak out and “send funding now”

Yeah after taking a closer look at everything, it seems that the actual headline is alarmist and heavily misleading.

The conclusion to take from this is that the pandemic had a mild negative impact on test results, but otherwise everything is fine, and actually marginally improved since these metrics were first established.

Based upon the graphs there it doesn't seem to have much changed since 2014, so I don't know that we can say it's going down.