A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
New research from the testing organization behind the nationwide Measure of Academic Progress exam shows that schools are making progress in recovering from the pandemic, but still not enough, and the results vary.
The Northwest Evaluation Association’s report shows that, as of fall 2024, about one-third of schools have returned to their prepandemic achievement levels in math or reading. But only 1-in-7, or about 14%, have recovered in both subjects.
The takeaway? One of the authors of the report tells me it shows progress, but not as much as we'd like.
“This percentage of schools is maybe lower than what we’d like to see, but it’s much higher than it was in 2021,” said Emily Morton, a lead research scientist at NWEA. “So we’ve seen some recovery, but we are far from done.”
While initial post-pandemic declines were larger in math, schools are making larger post-pandemic gains in math than in reading.
The study drew from MAP data from more than 5 million students across 9,300 schools nationwide. The paper notes that existing research has established the significant gaps left by the pandemic. This latest research aimed to show the variation of recovery across schools, and it identifies some trends in the types of schools that are seeing the best results.
For instance, the research shows that, as one might expect, schools that had smaller initial declines after the pandemic are generally seeing the strongest recoveries — but that wasn’t always the case. A surprising number of schools with steeper initial learning loss have managed to turn it around — 22% of schools that have “recovered” did so after suffering above-average initial declines, Morton said.
“There’s probably something to learn from those schools,” Morton said.
Another trend: Higher-poverty schools with historically marginalized students had the biggest drops in achievement post-pandemic and are also still the least likely to be recovered overall — but they’ve actually seen the biggest gains in the years since.
The new research doesn’t dive into the factors that may be explaining these trends. But Morton said there are some hypotheses out there. She noted that other research suggests that federal pandemic relief money for schools through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund played a role in helping schools stave off the worst of the pandemic and likely contributed to recovery. That program sent greater amounts of money to schools with higher poverty levels, potentially explaining why those schools have seen stronger growth.
“That would suggest that for some of these schools … the way they were investing money – whether it was tutoring, summer school, other sorts of learning supports, hiring additional staff – that those things did help to boost achievement,” Morton said.
So what are some of the roadblocks preventing recovery? Morton noted this study didn’t cover that, but again shared some other hypotheses that her colleagues and others are researching. Big areas of study include absenteeism, which increased during the pandemic; the rise of social media and cell phones (research shows that achievement was also declining in advance of the pandemic, which could support this, Morton noted); and less accountability in schools.
Morton says the research shows the benefits that states could reap by tracking school-level trajectories in this way. There’s a lot that can be gleaned by identifying schools the outliers, schools that resisted initial declines, or that had initial steep declines and have since rebounded. By tracking those results, policy makers may be able to figure out what those schools are doing — and how to replicate that success.
