Students are still struggling after COVID — and the ones struggling most may surprise you

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Once again, a new report is highlighting just how difficult it’s been for students to bounce back after the coronavirus pandemic.

This one comes from Curriculum Associates, which Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools parents should be somewhat familiar with — it’s the group behind the adaptive learning platform i-Ready, which CMS uses as a tool to diagnose students’ academic strengths and weaknesses.

The report gathers its data from i-Ready, looking at the trends in math and reading assessments for nearly 14 million K-8 students across the country. And we can look at this report in two ways — what it says about achievement nationwide, and what it reveals about different student subgroups.

To the former point, here’s the overall takeaway, at least according to Kristen Huff, the head of measurement at Curriculum Associates: We’ve plateaued since the pandemic. And that’s making it really hard for students to get back to where they were before the pandemic upended U.S. education.

“A bright spot is that, yes, students are learning,” Huff told me. “They are learning at about the same rate that they were learning at historically. But in order to catch up, that rate needs to accelerate.”

Take a look at these charts from the report. The top one shows the percentage of students scoring at grade-level proficiency between 2019 and 2024 for each grade in reading. The bottom one shows the same for math. So you can track each grade’s historic performance in each subject with the little trend line that connects the top of the bars.

Curriculum Associates

The first thing you might notice is that all but four groups are still scoring below where they were in 2019. Those four exceptions are grades 5-8 in reading — but that may not be much to celebrate. The percentages of students performing at grade level in those grades were low even before the pandemic — all of those grades clocked in at less than 50% in 2019. And those scores have all remained relatively stagnant since 2019.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with Dennis Davis, a professor of early literacy education at NC State, back when I was reporting this story on the challenges of improving literacy scores. I’d asked him how alarmed we should be looking at post-pandemic reading scores. He told me, “It’s normal and it’s also a crisis,” meaning historically we’ve struggled with reading nationwide, even before COVID-19 came along.

“These challenges have persisted for a long time,” he told me.

The other thing you might notice in those charts is how flat the lines get after the steep drops in 2020. That speaks to the slow rate of improvement Huff was referencing.

There are some small signs of improvement, particularly in grades 4-8 math. The report notes: “Though small, this upward trend is encouraging after a few years of little change.”

Younger students — even those who were toddlers during COVID — are struggling the most

But here’s the other thing that pops out when you look at those charts: It’s the younger students who appear to be struggling the most since COVID-19.

In both math and reading, students in K-3 are still scoring below grade level at rates well below their pre-pandemic peers. That’s where those gaps seem most pronounced.

And, as Huff told me, that’s surprising, because those students who are in K-3 right now were not even in school at the time the pandemic hit. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen data suggesting this, Huff told me. Curriculum Associates made a similar finding in another study last year.

“We were very, very, very concerned about the students who were in school, and they're learning was getting disrupted from the closures,” Huff said. “It didn't really occur to me to be as worried about students, or future students, who were only, you know, 2, 3, 4 years old during the pandemic. But their learning and development was impacted as well and the data show that.”

Achievement gaps persist

The report also reinforces a big point of concern we’ve seen elsewhere: The gap between high-achieving students and low-achieving students is growing. It’s a sign that students who are struggling are having a difficult time getting the help they need.

That was one of the headline items back in January, when the Department of Education released the results of its National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam.

The report shows that high-achievement students — say, in the 90th percentile — have managed to remain generally consistent in their academic performances since the pandemic, and in some cases even exceed it. But students in the 10th percentile have seen their scores continue to decline. And the report notes the range in scores between the 75th and 25th percentiles continues to grow.

Huff says it shows a need to target resources where they’re needed most.

When it comes to assessing achievement gaps, there was one encouraging finding: the percentage of students achieving grade-level proficiency at majority Black schools has shown steady increases in nearly every subject and at every grade. That comes even as the scores at majority white schools have ticked downwards.

But that isn’t enough to close the historic gaps between those two subgroups. For instance, in grade 8 reading, majority Black schools have seen the percentage of grade-level proficient students increase from 35.6% to 39.3%. That percentage slipped down a percentage point at majority white schools — though the number was still higher, at 55.6%.

What’s next?

We’ve got a few more important measures of achievement coming out in the weeks ahead.

At some point later this year, we’ll get the next round of NAEP scores. These scores will focus on 12th-grade reading and math and 8th-grade science.

And, the Department of Public Instruction will release its test scores and school performance data for the 2024-25 school year. That usually comes out in September.

Those local data will be particularly important — it will help show us how well CMS did in reaching its academic goals, which are focused on showing improvements in reading and math.