An analysis of national test score data out Tuesday further confirms a dismal reality facing schools: Academically, kids aren’t where they would’ve been pre-pandemic, and they aren’t progressing at the pace needed to catch up.
According to the analysis, in fact, students this past school year made fewer academic gains than they did the year prior – when classrooms were still dealing with frequent quarantines and learning disruptions.
“We have interrupted the progress that we were making until the fall of this (school) year,” said Karyn Lewis, co-author of the new analysis and a director at NWEA, a non-profit national research organization that develops assessments. “Not only have we not made progress toward recovery, we’re actually a bit worse off than we were at the start of the year.”
“This isn’t news anybody wanted to hear.”
More:Distracted students and stressed teachers: What an American school day looks like post-COVID
Key takeaways
The analysis focuses on roughly 6.7 million students in grades three through eight who took NWEA math and reading tests in the years since COVID hit, comparing them to their predecessors in the several years before the pandemic hit.
- Among students in all but the youngest grades tested, the achievement gains during the 2022-23 school year fell short of pre-pandemic trends. Yet that pre-pandemic pace is necessary to close the gap between today’s students and their predecessors.
- Significant gaps persisted at the end of this past school year: The average student will need the equivalent of roughly four additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and four and a half months to catch up in math.
- This past school year, students of all races and ethnicities struggled to progress at a pre-COVID pace, but the lags are especially pronounced among marginalized populations.
- Kids in grades six through eight are among the furthest behind when compared with how students in that age group tended to score before COVID. That’s particularly true in reading.
The ‘compounding debt’ of the pandemic
NWEA’s test score data suggests that learning losses accumulated over the course of the 2020-21 school year, resulting in a “low point” that spring. That was when schools saw the biggest gaps between students’ test scores and historical trends. Then, in 2021-22, students began progressing at rates seen pre-pandemic, in some cases even exceeding those rates.
But schools this past year haven’t managed to repeat that upward trend. Why? “We can think of the impact of the pandemic as a compounding debt,” Lewis said.
That debt was mostly incurred during the extended periods of remote learning, “and I think we had this hope that all we have to do is get them back in the classroom – that once they start learning again, we’ll just fix this gap up real quick,” she said. But that return to learning and that catch-up didn’t happen quickly enough, and the result was a wobbly foundation that led to worsening gaps.
More:How to know how your kid is doing in school, and what to do if they are falling behind
What this means for public schools
The trends highlighted by NWEA echo those from other national tests. USA TODAY reporters also corroborated these trends in a recent project for which they spent a school year observing in elementary classrooms.
Persistent attendance, staffing and mental health challenges – despite the influx of funding and an abundance of dedication of teachers on the ground – have in many ways made this past school year the hardest one yet since COVID. Programs such as intensive tutoring, summer school and longer days are only making a dent.
“This is a really hard needle to thread – how to message this – because we know schools are working so hard to get kids caught up and are really putting so much effort into recovery strategies,” Lewis said. “From what I’ve seen, schools are doing the right thing. But what these data really are shouting at us is that we’re not doing enough of the right things.”
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.
