For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, English learners’ average English-language proficiency test scores did not decline. Instead, they held steady or ticked up in most grades. And while average scores from the 2024-25 school year remain below pre-pandemic levels, long-term growth shows students are starting to rebound.
Those are some of the key findings from a new report from WIDA, a consortium of 42 states, territories, and federal agencies, which runs one of the most widely used English-language proficiency exams.
The latest edition of the report analyzed data from millions of test-takers. It serves as a national benchmark and framework for data analysis for educators working with English learners.
Following large declines in proficiency scores since the pandemic, the latest school year results, and growth rates, show signs students are turning a corner. Yet researchers warn that work remains to improve student outcomes, and that individual states, districts, and schools must assess their local contexts to find opportunities for supporting students.
“It’s not a complete recovery to pre-pandemic levels. It’s just the stop of a decline, which is really great, it’s something that we’ve been waiting for a long time,” said Narék Sahakyan, a researcher at WIDA and co-author of the report.
Test scores show room for improvement
Schools often rely on proficiency scores to determine whether a student remains in English-learner status. In the 2024-25 school year, the average scores were slightly higher or the same as the previous year, except for 1st graders, where the decline continued.
These results could signal that students are entering English-language services at lower levels of proficiency on average, but additional research would be needed to make that determination, said Glenn Poole, a WIDA researcher and co-author of the report.
The report also focuses on tracking growth, or an aggregate of how much individual students gained in their test scores from the previous year.
For the latest edition of the WIDA report, researchers included a 3-year growth analysis.
That longer-term review reinforced some of the annual growth trends researchers saw in previous editions of the report, namely: Students were making less progress for several years following the onset of the pandemic. A few years out from those major disruptions, long-term gains in students’ academic English-language proficiency are starting to rebound from where they were during those years most affected by disruptions, Poole said.
Poole and Sahakyan say there’s a lot to unpack from the national dataset, especially at the local level, for educators to help sustain growth and ultimately increase average proficiency levels.
Educators need to dig into their data
One of the ways to further analyze the data is to break the results down by demographics.
The WIDA report, as in years prior, dissected scores and growth by whether students were Hispanic or not. They found disparities continue to persist with Hispanic students having overall lower average proficiency scores than their non-Hispanic peers, Poole said.
However, when analyzing long-term proficiency growth rates, researchers found Hispanic students’ growth rates have increased in the last couple of years and started to narrow the disparities of long-term growth overall between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students.
Rebecca Bergey, a principal researcher focusing on English learners at the American Institutes for Research, warns against making broad assumptions about what this means for Hispanic students and advises individual states, districts, and schools to further break down results by more detailed demographics and local contexts.
For instance, how do scores and growth rates compare between students enrolled in dual-language programs versus English-only language services? Are there any trends between urban and rural districts? Or in schools with high versus low English-learner concentrations? Are students in one school mostly newcomers, or are most born in the U.S., and are there any differences or trends there?
All of these factors play a role in how educators support students’ success, Bergey said.
