Students struggle to shake learning loss, 4 years later

More than four years after the start of COVID-19 and despite millions of dollars in emergency funding, student learning loss is a major problem.

New research from NWEA, a nonprofit research organization, shows students going into high school are a full year behind academically, a disappointing but unsurprising development for experts who have been tracking progress, or the lack thereof.

“We had hoped that we would be able to bring a story of more recovery, or some recovery, but our results this year are remarkably strikingly similar to what we saw in the 2023 school year, and that the evidence really is suggesting that recovery is largely stalled, and that’s because students, although they’re making progress, they’re doing so at rates that are below prepandemic averages, so we’re not seeing much recovery at all,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA. 

In almost all grades, NWEA found the gap has widened between pre-COVID and post-COVID test scores, by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math.

On average, students will need 4.8 months more of instruction in reading and 4.4 months in math to catch up to their prepandemic numbers.

“I’m certainly not shocked,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. “I think that the sort of fine-grain details of individual studies vary in terms of how far behind we are, how much recovery there is that differs by grades and whether it’s more or less in reading or math, but the broad trend from across a lot of different studies is we’re still behind. At most we’ve recovered a fraction of what was lost, and I think most studies also show that students from historically disadvantaged groups were worse off or haven’t recovered as much.” 

The NWEA data came from 7.7 million students’ scores from this past spring in grades three through eight.  

Younger students are showing a little better recovery, only needing 2.2 months more in reading and 1.3 months in math to get them up to pre-COVID levels.

“If we haven’t filled in the expectations in prior grades for what students should know, that it’s going to be really difficult for them to interact with new content that builds on what they have already expected to have mastered, and that’s going to be a challenge for students,” said Lewis.

The low test scores despite the $200 billion in federal pandemic funding to schools have concerned experts, with some arguing interventions were ineffectively run or the money was spent unwisely.

Districts spent a “large amount of money in ways that have been effective, but not nearly effective enough to close these performance gaps. Things like tutoring, which I think, by all accounts, is effective but hasn’t reached all the students that it needs to or hasn’t been as intense or as well designed as it needs to,” Polikoff said.  

“Without really radical intervention, it’s not surprising to me that we haven’t that we haven’t recovered,” he added. 

Angela Morabito, spokesperson for Defense of Freedom Institute, said the Biden administration should have required all the pandemic funding go directly toward combating learning loss.

“The fact that only 20 percent was required, I have just yet to hear a good explanation for. So we had a lot of the money get used on things that were priorities of adults instead of what was best for students. So, the results here — the students haven’t bounced back — are just not surprising,” Morabito said.

Faced with pandemic conditions, schools spent federal funding on everything from updating HVAC systems to increasing mental health resources to raising teacher salaries in an effort to improve retention.

Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA, said the pandemic money for schools was originally designed for public safety first and to get students back in schools, leaving learning loss to come second as individuals didn’t know how massive the problem would be back in 2020.

“At the time the money started flowing, we did not have the same understanding of how deep the learning disruption would be and what it would look like and for which kids,” she said, adding schools “did not have enough time” to implement new learning loss programs “to really see the maximum effectiveness of what intervention at scale could look like.” 

Chronic absenteeism has also spiked since the pandemic hit, with one analysis from the American Enterprise Institute showing it went up 14 percent from 2018 to 2022.  

The Economic Council of Advisors says 27 percent of the declines in math scores and 45 percent of the declines in reading could be attributed to chronic absenteeism.  

“I also think we need to look to the context that students are in. We know chronic rates of absenteeism are still quite high relative to prepandemic trends, and so we shouldn’t expect — of course, the students aren’t in the classroom as often as we would want them to be, [so] they’re not going to be learning at the pace that we would want them to be,” Lewis said.