Four years after covid, many students still losing ground

For a time, it appeared as if academic recovery from covid was underway. Now, new research shows that many students are actually sinking even deeper.

The research is based on tests from last winter and spring 2024, four years after schools abruptly went online - and comes just as billions of dollars in federal covid relief money for schools runs out.

“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” concluded a paper released Tuesday by NWEA, a testing company that works in more than 9,000 U.S. school systems. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer supports this conclusion.”

The test score gaps between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are growing wider, the group found, and are worse than “what we had previously deemed as the low point.”

Together, data from three large testing companies paint a more pessimistic and troubling picture than prior reports and raise questions about how school districts, which face a fall deadline to spend the last of the $190 billion in federal covid relief money, will help large numbers of students who are still behind.

“We’re a long way from pre-pandemic levels of student achievement,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington, who was not involved in any of the new reports.

It’s unclear exactly why some students remain behind, but experts suggest that teaching children what they missed and current material at the same time is a tall task. Researchers at NWEA, hunting for possible explanations, say one factor may be rising absenteeism. “If kids aren’t in their classroom, how can they be learning?” asked Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA.

The new research comes from NWEA, Curriculum Associates and Renaissance - companies that are employed by school districts to provide assessments throughout the year to help teachers track their students’ progress.

Their findings do not line up perfectly. Two of the three companies found that older students are struggling more than younger ones, while the third found the reverse. But all three found large groups of students who are falling further behind.

NWEA examined spring 2024 scores from about 7.7 million students from grades three to eight who took its MAP tests. It found the gaps between those results, compared with how students performed pre-pandemic, have widened in the years since the height of the pandemic in many grades. For instance, the gap with pre-covid results in sixth grade grew by 40 percent in math between fall 2023 and spring 2024; the gap in eighth grade reading grew by 31 percent.

The gaps are so large, for instance, that the average eighth-grader would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levels in math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.

The youngest students performed better, NWEA found. They still lagged behind their pre-pandemic counterparts but have started to close the gaps, while they’ve widened for older students. Third-graders, for instance, would need 2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.

“Students, especially older ones, remain a long way from recovery,” the report said.

Some middle-schoolers are struggling because they are behind on basic reading skills, said Cory Chapman, a special education math teacher at MacFarland Middle School in Northwest Washington. This past year’s seventh-graders were in third grade - a crucial year for literacy - when the pandemic sent them home for virtual school.

“The thing is, once you get past third grade, no one’s teaching you how to read anymore,” Chapman said. He has students who understand math - they can multiply, divide and solve equations - but can’t comprehend word problems. “So that wonderful math kid now gets bumped down a little bit because they can’t get through the words.”

Renaissance, which administers Star assessments, does not yet have results for spring 2024, but it does have data from last winter for 5 million students in math and 6.3 million in reading. Its findings echo NWEA: The oldest students are struggling the most.

In math, Renaissance found that first-graders had recovered to pre-covid levels of achievement, and there was steady progress from grades two to six. But the gaps between where scores used to be and where they are now widened in math for grades eight through 12.

“Not only has there been no progress in closing the initial covid impacts, average performance in those grades is even farther,” a summary of the results said. “It’s as if the pandemic or some other factor is continuing to result in lower and lower performance.”

The losses were less steep in reading, Renaissance found, and students were not as far behind. Grades one and four had caught up, and grades three and five through 12 were making steady progress. Grade two had made no progress, a finding that researchers were not sure how to explain.

The third testing company, Curriculum Associates, which administers i-Ready assessments, found somewhat different results. It follows cohorts of students and found those who were in grades two, three and four in 2021-22 showing signs of recovery in reading; in math, this was only true of those who were in grade four that school year. It also found that, in most cases, students who were close to or on grade level at that time were doing well by spring 2024.

But on average, younger students and those who were academically behind have lost even more ground in the last two years.

“The younger cohorts had their early childhood experiences messed up - maybe they did not get some foundational skills,” said Jennifer Sattem, senior director of research strategy at Curriculum Associates.

“Recovery is a little bit all over the place,” she added.

Some researchers suggested the academic regression may relate to a twin crisis unfolding across the country: chronic absenteeism. The average number of students missing at least 10 percent of school days - about 18 days - nearly doubled from 15 percent in 2017-18 to 28 percent in 2021-22, based on data from all 50 states analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The rate improved but only slightly in 2022-23 - to 26 percent, based on 43 states. Data for last school year is not yet available in most states.

It’s hard for students who are not in school to learn, and students who return after missing days in class are often confused and behind, leaders and experts in academia say.

“There’s absolutely a correlation between students coming to school and academics,” said Tiffany Anderson, superintendent of the Topeka Public Schools in Kansas. Before the pandemic, her district successfully worked to decrease chronic absenteeism but saw it spike again in 2021 and 2022. It fell to about 24 percent last school year - still double the pre-pandemic rate.

A 2016 study published in the Economics of Education Review found that reducing absences by 10 days led to gains of 5.5 percent in math and 2.9 percent in reading. An analysis published last year by the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that absenteeism accounts for 27 percent of the overall test score decline in fourth-grade math and 45 percent of the decline in fourth-grade reading. Research last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that schools with greater increases in chronic absenteeism also had steeper drops in proficiency tests; however, it said that it was not clear if one was causing the other.

In D.C.’s charter and traditional public schools, officials also see a connection between academic performance and attendance and have battled to bring down chronic absenteeism. Roughly 35 percent of students in both school systems were chronically absent between the start of the year and March 1, compared to almost 40 percent over the same period during the 2022-23 school year, according to a midyear attendance report.

Complete data for last year is not yet available. By the end of the 2022-23 school year, chronic absenteeism had reached 43 percent - lower than the previous year but still 13 percentage points higher than pre-pandemic.

“We need young people in school every day, all the time, in order to ensure that we are recovering most effectively and that they are showing up and learning as much as they possibly can,” " said Paul Kihn, the city’s deputy mayor for education. “That’s why you see our relentless pursuit of improved attendance.”

Schools have sent automated letters and phone calls to remind parents about attendance, changed program offerings to entice more kids to come, and even purchased rides for students who don’t have safe or reliable transportation. The D.C. Council is piloting an approach that will send teens to social service programs, rather than penalizing them in court, for missing class.

Districts cross the country are making similar efforts, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Georgetown University education think tank.

“There are a lot of states and districts that are really working hard on absenteeism, but I think it’s something that we have to continue to have this sense of urgency on because we will never get the kinds of academic results that kids deserve if we don’t figure out how to get them to come to school regularly,” Cohen said. “Everything else that we’re trying to do around learning loss, whether it’s tutoring or extending the school day or whatever, it’s only going to work if the kids are in school.”