Schools have tried a combination of moves—including in- and after-school tutoring, an emphasis on social-emotional well-being, and summer school—to get learning levels back to where they were before the pandemic. But students are still not fully caught up, educators say in a new survey.
In the nationally representative poll of 990 teachers, principals, and district leaders, conducted in December by the EdWeek Research Center, respondents indicated that the levels of unfinished learning or “learning loss” still fell largely in the “moderate” or “severe” categories. Unfinished learning refers to when students haven’t fully mastered the concepts and skills at their grade level and need help to cover the gaps in their learning to succeed in future grades.
The educators’ perception reflects academic trends of the past few years—while academic interventions did improve the learning gaps created by the pandemic, the recovery process hasn’t been as rapid as schools had hoped. Researchers have pegged this to uneven implementation of efforts like high-dosage tutoring.
“The share of students receiving summer school and the share of students attending summer school was lower than needed. The recovery efforts were not intensive enough,” said Thomas Kane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Second, districts implementing large-scale tutoring for the first time had challenges.”
Kane was a co-author of a research paper that had tracked the overall gains made by students across the country in the 2022-23 school year. The data and analysis, published by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and the Education Opportunity Project at Stanford University in early 2024, telegraphed that federal recovery dollars, spent on efforts like tutoring and summer school, did help catch students up on unfinished learning.
In a single year—between spring 2022 and 2023—students on average gained back one-third of their original loss in math, and one-quarter of the original loss in reading, the study found. The improvements amounted to more than what students would have learned in a regular, pre-pandemic academic year, but students were still below the level where they needed to be, the researchers noted. The gains were also not equally distributed across student subgroups.
However, the impact of these high-intensity tutoring models, and other efforts to close learning gaps, lessened when applied to schools at scale, according to a meta-analysis of 265 randomized control trials on impact of tutoring, published in October 2024.
Also, data published by the assessment provider NWEA indicate that learning recovery hasn’t just stalled—in some grades, students are losing academic ground. NWEA analyzed data from students in grades 3-8 from schools nationwide, and compared how much students had progressed over the 2023-24 school year to the aggregate learning growth of a pre-pandemic comparison group.
Educators point to learning loss across subjects, grade levels
The educators who were polled by the EdWeek Research Center were asked their perception of how much learning remained unfinished for students across subject areas and grades.
In elementary grades, about 40 percent of educators said students were still at “moderate” levels of unfinished learning or learning loss in math and English/language arts.
Thirty-three percent of educators said the level of unfinished learning in elementary math was “severe” or “very severe,” and 31 percent said the same about unfinished learning in English/language arts.
In middle and high school, educators reported a slightly wider gap between levels of unfinished learning in math and reading. Forty-six percent of respondents said their secondary students fell in the “moderate” category when it comes to learning loss in English/language arts; 40 percent said the same about math.
Thirty-seven percent of educators said the level of unfinished learning in secondary math was “severe” or “very severe,” while 26 percent of educators said the same about unfinished learning in English/language arts.
“Even moderate learning gaps show that there’s much more ground to be covered,” said Ayesha Hashim, a senior research scientist with NWEA.
To make the most of interventions, schools have to rely on parents
Schools should continue with efforts like high-dosage tutoring and summer school, Hashim said—but they will have to face this challenge even as pandemic recovery dollars ebb.
“We have seen these interventions have modest impacts,” she said. “They are starting to work. But now that schools have built the capacity and willingness [to implement], the funding is gone.”
Anecdotally, Hashim said, district leaders are now focused on improving core instruction, too. Getting more effective teachers into the classroom has led to some early gains in learning, she said.
The other strategy that schools should focus on is getting parents involved by keeping them abreast of how their children are doing, said Kane.
Parents don’t have access to the kind of grade-level data that teachers do, which tells them how students are doing now compared to before the pandemic.
“Parents don’t see that students are behind what grade they’re in, or how engaged they are in school,” he said. “It’s easy to see how they might be under the impression that that everything’s fine.”
If parents don’t see the urgency of repairing students’ grades, they might not push too hard to get their kids into summer school or make sure students are regularly attending school, Kane said.
Helping parents understand their child’s academic position, and getting their buy-in to reduce chronic absenteeism, can be a low-cost option for schools to continue on the path to academic recovery, Kane said.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
