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Almost five years have passed since COVID-19 first disrupted America’s schools, and new data, known as the Nation’s Report Card, offers cause for hope — and concern.

The good news: In math, many students have made up at least some of the academic ground they lost during the pandemic.

The bad news: In both reading and math, most fourth- and eighth-graders in 2024 still performed below pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

What’s more, while these achievement declines were exacerbated by the pandemic, they appear to have begun even before COVID-19, raising important questions about why students are still struggling and what educators and policymakers can do about it.

The news arrives as the nation’s public schools have largely spent the $190 billion in federal emergency funding they received from Congress to help pay for, among other things, research-backed interventions, including summer school and tutoring. Previous research suggests that money did lead to modest academic gains, though this new data shows students still have a long way to go.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969. Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades.

Students held steady in math or even made up ground 

In fourth grade, the average math score ticked up slightly compared with 2022, ending a pandemic slide. In fact, white, Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students all showed modest gains, on average.

“In fourth grade, it seems that, regardless of where students were, they were improving,” says Lisa Ashe, a math consultant with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy.

That said, fourth-grade math scores still remained below pre-pandemic 2019 levels, with one exception: Alabama was the only state where fourth-graders’ average math scores surpassed 2019 scores. (In 2022, lawmakers there passed a law aimed at improving math proficiency for all K-5 students in the state.)

But COVID-19 isn’t all to blame. A longer view of fourth-graders’ math scores — and student achievement more broadly — shows those scores began stagnating and even declining before the pandemic. Math scores peaked around 2013. Multiple education researchers tell NPR they aren’t sure why.

“That is the multitrillion-dollar question,” says Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington who has studied pandemic learning loss.

One thing we know is that fourth-grade math performance improved around the same time the old federal education law known as No Child Left Behind (signed in 2002) enforced strict new accountability requirements. When those requirements were phased out (beginning in 2012) and ultimately replaced (in 2015), math performance, especially among lower-performers, fell.

That’s just one possible explanation for the slowdown that the pandemic worsened. Goldhaber suggests learning could also have been set back by the Great Recession, by kids’ increased access to smartphones and tablets or by the ripple effects of a decline in kids reading for fun. (Since 2017, fewer and fewer students have reported to NAEP that they enjoy reading.)

“It’s important to understand what caused that earlier stagnation if we’re going to get out of the mire of the pandemic,” Goldhaber says.

For eighth-graders, math scores held steady in 2024 compared with 2022. But as with fourth-graders, they remained below pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

What’s more, the Nation’s Report Card highlights some worrying divergence happening within those scores. The highest-performing eighth-graders improved in math compared with 2022, but the lowest-performing students moved in the opposite direction, losing ground in 2024.

“That actually caused alarm,” Ashe says of the widening achievement gap. “We need to meet the needs of these students that are in the lower percentiles, because something that we’re doing is not working for those students.”

Overall, 39% of fourth-graders and 28% of eighth-graders scored at or above NAEP’s standard for proficiency in math. That’s a little better than in 2022.

The NAEP report warns against comparing these results to state-reported numbers, as “the NAEP standard for proficiency represents competency over challenging subject matter, a standard that exceeds most states’ standards for proficient or grade-level achievement.”

Reading: The bad news got worse

The results in reading weren’t nearly as hopeful as they were in math:

Fourth-graders continued to lose ground in 2024, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than they were in 2022 and much lower than they were in 2019. 

In 2019, 35% of fourth-graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard.

That figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31%, in 2024.

As with math, these declines aren’t entirely the fault of the pandemic. Fourth-grade reading scores began falling years earlier, around 2015.

Only one state, Louisiana, saw its 2024 fourth-grade reading scores surpass 2019 scores.

It’s worth remembering: This current round of fourth-graders, from the 2023-2024 school year, were in kindergarten when the pandemic first closed schools, and many spent some or all of first grade learning remotely.

Eighth-graders’ 2024 reading scores also dropped compared with 2022, with just 30% of students performing at or above NAEP’s proficient standard.

NAEP classifies students at one of three skill levels: advanced, proficient or the lowest, basic. According to the results, the share of eighth-graders reading below NAEP’s basic standard “was the largest in the assessment’s history.”

Not only that, but the worst-performing readers in 2024 scored “lower than our lower performers did 30 years ago for fourth and eighth grade. That’s how low these scores historically have dropped,” says Peggy Carr, commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics.

Not one state improved its eighth-grade reading scores compared with 2022, let alone 2019.

The connection between poverty and performance

This year’s NAEP results include a new, more precise index for determining students’ socioeconomic status (SES), and the results show, in stark detail, what teachers and researchers have long understood: That poverty and performance are deeply connected.

For example, the overwhelming majority (77%) of fourth-grade students in the highest SES category — the wealthiest kids — performed above the national average in reading.

Of the fourth-graders in the lowest SES category, though, the results are nearly flipped, with just 34% performing above the national average.

The results in math performance were similarly disparate.

On a positive note, while many big-city districts made important gains in fourth-grade math with their economically disadvantaged students, a handful of districts did exceptionally well, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, Guilford County Schools (also in North Carolina), Baltimore City Public Schools and the San Diego Unified School District.

Missing school is getting in the way of learning 

When students took the latest NAEP assessments, in early 2024, they were asked how many days they had been absent the previous month. The results are slightly encouraging: A smaller percentage of fourth- and eighth-graders reported missing five or more days of school in the past month compared with 2022.

But across the board, lower-performing students were more likely to report missing five or more days of school in the previous month, compared with higher-performing students.

Simply put, missing school means missing learning.

When students miss 10% or more of a school year, they’re considered “chronically absent,” and as NPR has previously reported, the rates of chronic absenteeism doubled during the pandemic.

The link that NAEP shows between missing school and lower academic achievement doesn’t surprise Hedy Chang, head of Attendance Works, an organization devoted to fighting chronic absenteeism. “It’s not just affecting academics,” she says of absenteeism. “It’s affecting social development and executive functioning.”

To continue on the path of improving attendance and in turn student achievement, Chang suggests that districts look at the students who are missing the most school and the hurdles they’re facing.

“You might not be able to take it all, tackle it all, at once,” Chang says. “You might have to tackle it in bits and pieces, either by barrier or by grade or by this subset of schools.”

She says making sure all students are going to school could go a long way in bolstering student achievement.