Students’ reading scores haven’t budged from pandemic-era lows, even as math achievement has crept up, according to new data released today from the testing group NWEA.
The latest analysis of the organization’s MAP tests, taken several times a year by more than 20 million K-8 students, looks at reading and math achievement in spring 2025.
In math, students in most grades have continued to make slow and steady progress, a trend that began in spring 2021, though overall scores are still below pre-pandemic levels.
But in reading, scores in most grades are unchanged from spring 2021—and in some cases, have fallen further.
As a result, the brief’s authors write, “the lack of progress in reading means literacy could become the more persistent barrier to full recovery.”
The reading slump has been well documented in other data sources. In January, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed reading scores for 4th and 8th grades continuing to drop, and the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students growing ever larger. On NAEP, this trend predates the pandemic.
“Why is math recovering (albeit slowly and modestly) but reading is continuing to decline? It’s hard to say,” wrote NWEA researchers Megan Kuhfeld and Karyn Lewis in a March article about overall national achievement trends. Kuhfeld, NWEA’s director of growth modeling and data analytics, and Lewis, the organization’s vice president of research and policy partnerships, also co-authored the most recent brief.
“One possibility is that schools focused recovery efforts more heavily on math skills coming out of the pandemic, since math is where the largest initial drops were reported,” they wrote in the March article. “Another factor may be that math, by its nature, is easier to remediate. Mathematical concepts can often be broken down into discrete skills, making targeted interventions easier to implement.”
Reading practices that might move the needle on student achievement, they wrote, “may be more dependent on broader instruction shifts” that take longer to translate into improved outcomes.
Other data, though, suggest that factors beyond pandemic-era schooling disruptions might also play a role in declining reading scores: Adult Americans’ literacy scores have fallen over the past decade, too, international exams show.
In math, students are slowly gaining ground
The NWEA brief released today shows that in 3rd grade, for example, students’ reading scores were still 0.14 of a standard deviation lower, on average, in 2025 than they were in 2019. That figure is unchanged from spring 2021.
In math, by contrast, students’ scores saw a much bigger initial drop between 2019 and 2021: 3rd graders’ scores were 0.28 of a standard deviation lower. But by spring 2025, 3rd graders’ scores were only 0.11 of a standard deviation lower than they were in 2019. Students are slowly closing the gap.
This pattern holds across student subgroups—children of all races and socio-economic statuses are making progress. But pre-pandemic achievement gaps between white students and their Black and Hispanic peers, and between students in high- and low-povery schools, remain.
To put the gap between 2019 and 2025 achievement levelsin perspective, the researchers write, the average intervention in education research literature improves student achievement by 0.05 of a standard deviation.
“In most grades and subjects, the scale of unfinished recovery is three or more times that magnitude,” the brief reads. (Going forward, NWEA is making achievement-trends data on its MAP assessments publicly available through a dashboard on its website.)
As evidence of widespread reading stagnation continues to mount, the literacy education community has continued to debate what exactly is causing this problem—and in turn, how to fix it.
In the wake of the NAEP scores release in January, politicians, researchers, and pundits blamed a series of factors: what they saw as ineffective use of federal pandemic relief funds, the loosening of test-based accountability policies, and the rise of social media and reading on screens.
And some pointed to the only state that saw statistically significant 4th grade reading growth on NAEP, Louisiana, as a model. Over the past decade, the state has incentivized districts to use common English/language arts curricula designed around evidence-based practices.
