The pandemic recovery has not just stalled; students in most grades are losing academic ground, according to new national data.
The testing group NWEA has tracked academic gaps and sputtering student learning growth since the pandemic began, using data from a widely used computer-based formative assessment, MAP-Growth.
NWEA analyzed data from some 7.7 million students in grades 3-8 at more than 22,000 schools nationwide, comparing how much students progressed from fall to spring in the 2023-24 school year, to the aggregate learning growth of a pre-COVID comparison group of 10 million students in the same grades who took the test in the 2016–17, 2017–18, and 2018–19 school years.
Significant instruction needed to catch up to pre-pandemic levels
On average across grades, NWEA found students will need an extra 4.8 months of reading instruction and 4.3 months of math instruction to catch up to pre-pandemic academic achievement. That is only two months less than the NWEA estimated a year ago would be needed for math, and seven months additional reading instruction than researchers thought would be needed last year.
“I know it’s disheartening to see these results, especially when our school leaders we know have been going to heroic lengths to try and get kids recovered, but these data indicate that what we’re doing is not enough,” said Karyn Lewis, director of the Center for School and Student Progress at NWEA and a co-author of a new study of pandemic learning recovery. “We might be choosing the right strategies, but we’re not doing them at the right scale in order to get kids where we want them to be.”
Disparities in recovery among different racial groups
The academic progress of students in different racial groups has shifted since the pandemic. From 2016-19, white and Hispanic elementary students and Asian and Hispanic middle school students made faster-than-average growth in reading. But in 2023-24, all groups grew 15 percent or more below the average pre-pandemic growth rate. In math, only Asian students have continued to progress faster than the national pre-pandemic average in both elementary and middle school.
But students in the transition from elementary to middle school have fared worse. Sixth graders’ progress from fall to spring slowed 82 percent in reading and 40 percent in math in the 2023-24 school year compared to the same period in 2022-23.
Compared to student learning rates before the pandemic, 6th graders made 21 percent less reading progress in reading and 11 percent less math progress during the 2023-24 school year.
The backsliding has increased the extra instruction these students will need to catch up before they reach high school.
“Sixth grade is [the] first year of middle school in many cases,” Lewis said. “That is a really challenging year to move from the elementary space to the middle school space. We see consistently, our middle school students are the grades where we’re seeing the least amount of recovery.”
Concerns over long-term recovery for older students
The findings come as school districts face the end of the largest federal emergency school aid in history. The $190 billion ESSER grants—invested in everything from intensive tutoring and summer school to better HVAC systems—accounted for more than a third of total learning recovery in math through the end of 2023, according to nationwide studies released last month. But, each $1,000 per student that districts received from federal aid only brought about six days’ worth of additional math progress for students, and little to no benefit in reading.
“For these older students where we see fully a year or more of additional instruction is necessary, there is no way to pack that into a single school year. This is a multi-year task; it’s going to extend well past the expiration of the ESSER funds,” Lewis said. “This is where alarm bells are going off all over the place. I’m really concerned about those students for whom we have the least amount of time to get them caught up, but we have the furthest to go.
“I worry that our high school teachers are not as well equipped to understand and deal with the kinds of gaps students are going to be coming into their classroom with,” she said.
Third graders show slight improvement, but still lag behind
Alone of all grades tested, 3rd graders grew faster in 2023-24 compared to the prior school year—by 4 percent in reading and 3 percent in math—but they still performed below pre-pandemic achievement in both subjects.
“That starts to suggest that ... potentially early elementary teachers are better equipped to differentiate students and support them at the range of levels that are coming into their classroom,” Lewis said, “and older grades teachers might have less experience supporting students who might have gaps in their prior knowledge that haven’t yet been filled in.”
Disengagement hampers recovery efforts, especially for older students
Lewis said disengagement also may hamstring academic recovery efforts, particularly for older students.
Most districts’ ESSER interventions, like tutoring and summer programs, have been voluntary, with the students most in need often less likely to participate. Even when such interventions are mandatory, chronic absenteeism remains nearly twice as high nationwide now as it was before the pandemic, with more than 1 in 4 students missing 10 percent of class days in 2023.
Parents have reported being more willing to allow older students to skip school for scheduling conflicts, oversleeping, or just being bored, according to a national survey this spring by the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.
“We know that for these older students that the data suggests the least amount of recovery is happening for, those are the grades where we also tend to see higher levels of chronic absenteeism and disengagement in general,” Lewis said. “So it’s not surprising that it’s harder to remediate and get recovery in those students if they’re not in the classroom, or if they are in the classroom are rather disengaged with the content.”
