More than four years after the COVID-19 outbreak, student learning loss remains a major issue, despite millions of dollars in emergency funding.
A new study from the nonprofit research institute NWEA finds that students are entering high school a year behind academically — a disappointing but unsurprising development for experts who have been tracking progress, or the lack thereof.
“We had hoped to deliver a story of further recovery, or even some degree of recovery, but this year’s results are strikingly similar to those for 2023, and the evidence suggests the recovery has largely stalled, as students are making progress but at a pace below pre-pandemic averages, with little sign of recovery,” said Karin Lewis, NWEA’s director of research and policy partnerships.
NWEA found that across nearly every grade level, the gap in test scores before and after COVID-19 has widened by an average of 36 percentage points in reading and 18 percentage points in math.
On average, students would need 4.8 more months of instruction in reading and 4.4 more months in math to catch up to pre-pandemic levels.
“I’m not surprised at all,” says Morgan Polykoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. “I think the finer details of each individual study will vary based on how far behind they are, how much they’re regaining at different grade levels, whether it’s reading or math skills that are regained, and so on, but the broad trends that we see across a lot of different studies are that they’re still behind. At best, they’ve regained only a small fraction of what was lost. And I think most studies show that students from historically disadvantaged groups are either doing worse or haven’t recovered as much.”
The NWEA data comes from the spring performance of 7.7 million students in grades 3 through 8.
Younger students are recovering slightly better, with just 2.2 months left in reading and 1.3 months left in math to return to pre-COVID levels.
“If we’re not replenishing the expectations from previous grades of what students need to know, it’s going to be very difficult for students to tackle new material that builds on what they should already know, and that’s going to be a challenge for students,” Lewis said.
Experts have expressed concern about the low test scores despite the $200 billion in federal pandemic relief funds given to schools, with some arguing the measures were not implemented effectively or the funds were not used wisely.
“School districts have spent a lot of money on methods that, while effective, don’t come close to closing these achievement gaps. Things like tutoring, while I think they’re effective from every perspective, aren’t reaching all the students who need them or they’re not as intensive or well designed as they should be,” Polikoff said.
“Without really drastic interventions, it’s no wonder we’re not recovering,” he added.
Angela Morabito, a spokeswoman for the Institute for Defense of Liberty, said the Biden administration should have mandated that all pandemic-related funding go directly to addressing learning loss.
“I have yet to hear a satisfactory explanation for the fact that only 20 percent was needed, so a lot of money was spent on adult priorities rather than what was best for students. So the results here, student achievement has not recovered, are not at all surprising,” Morabito said.
Faced with the pandemic, schools have spent federal money on everything from updating HVAC systems to boosting mental health resources and raising teacher salaries in an effort to improve student retention.
Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president of policy and government relations at NWEA, said pandemic funding for schools was originally designed to put public safety first and get students back in schools, with learning loss taking a back seat in 2020 because it wasn’t clear how big the problem would become.
“When the funding started flowing, we didn’t have the same understanding of how severe the learning disruptions were and in what ways and which children they would affect,” she said, adding that schools “didn’t have the time to implement new learning loss programs to really see what large-scale interventions would look like and what their greatest impact would be.”
Chronic absenteeism has also skyrocketed since the pandemic began, increasing 14% from 2018 to 2022, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute.
The Council of Economic Advisers says 27 percent of math grade declines and 45 percent of reading grade declines can be attributed to chronic absenteeism.
“I also think we need to look at the situation that students are in. We know that chronic absenteeism rates are still pretty high compared to pre-pandemic trends. So, of course, we shouldn’t expect that just because students aren’t in the classroom as much as we would like them to be able to learn at the pace that we would like them to,” Lewis said.
