Most U.S. students are recovering from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions are making up little ground

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia – On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read a book together. Scattered elsewhere, students sat in front of laptops and received reading help from online tutors.

For third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was a normal school day. But educators were racing to get students to learn more and faster and overcome setbacks that persisted since schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.

American schools have begun to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven geographically and economically, with millions of students – often from marginalized groups – gaining little or no ground.

Nationally, students accounted for a third of the pandemic losses in math during the last school year and a quarter of the pandemic losses in reading, according to the Educational Recovery Scorecardan analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to decline during the 2022-23 school year, following earlier declines during the pandemic.

Overshadowing the recovery is a looming financial crisis. States used some of the money from the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic aid to help students catch upbut that money ends this year.

“The recovery is not complete and will not be complete without state action,” said Thomas Kane, the Harvard economist responsible for the scorecard. “States need to start planning what they will do when the federal money runs out in September. And I think very few states have really started that discussion.”

Virginia lawmakers approved an additional $418 million last year to speed recovery. Massachusetts officials have set aside $3.2 million to provide math classes for fourth- and eighth-graders who are below grade level, as well as $8 million for literacy classes.

But among other states making slow progress, few said they were changing their strategies or spending more to accelerate improvements.

Virginia hired online tutoring companies and gave schools a “playbook” showing how to create effective tutoring programs. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said last year’s state test results were a wake-up call.

“We weren’t recovering as quickly as we needed to,” Coons said in an interview.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has called on states to continue funding extra academic aid for students as federal money expires.

“We simply cannot stop now,” he said at a conference for education journalists on May 30. “States need to recognize the work of these interventions. Financing public education makes a difference.”

In Virginia, the Alexandria district received $2.3 million in additional state money to expand in-person tutoring.

At Mount Vernon, where classes are taught in English and Spanish, students are divided into groups and move through stations customized to their skill level. Those who need help most receive private lessons online. In Fletcher’s classroom, some students wore headphones and worked with tutors through Ignite Learning, one of the companies contracted by the state.

With the high demand for tutors, the online option has been a huge help, said Mount Vernon Principal Jennifer Hamilton.

“That’s something we just couldn’t provide here,” she said.

Ana Marisela Ventura Moreno said her 9-year-old daughter, Sabrina, benefited significantly from extra reading help last year during second grade, but is still recovering.

“She needs to improve. She’s not at the level she should be,” the mother said in Spanish. She noticed that the school didn’t offer tutoring help this year, but she didn’t know why.

Alexandria education officials say students who score below proficient or near that threshold receive high-intensity tutoring help and have to prioritize students with the greatest needs. Alexandria fell behind the state average on math and reading exams in 2023, but is slowly improving.

More troubling to officials are the disparities: Among Mount Vernon’s poorest students, just 24% scored proficient in math and 28% met the mark in reading. This is much lower than rates among wealthier students, and the divide is widening.

Failing to get students back on track can have serious consequences. Harvard and Stanford researchers found that communities with higher test scores have higher incomes and lower rates of arrest and incarceration. If pandemic setbacks become permanent, it could follow students for life.

The Educational Recovery Scorecard tracks about 30 states, all of which made at least some improvement in math from 2022 to 2023. States whose reading scores fell over that period, in addition to Virginia, were Nevada, California, South Dakota, Wyoming , Indiana , Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington.

Only a few states have recovered to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math performance increased beyond 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana did so in reading.

In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score increased by the equivalent of 70% of a grade from 2022 to 2023. Gains in math were less dramatic, with students still behind by nearly half a grade compared with 2019. Officials of Chicago attribute the improvement to changes made possible by nearly $3 billion in federal aid.

The district has trained hundreds of Chicago residents to work as tutors. Every school building has an interventionist, an educator who focuses on helping struggling students.

The district also used federal money to home visits and expanded arts education in an effort to re-engage students.

“Academic recovery alone, just through ‘drill and kill’, whether through private tutoring or interventions, is not effective,” said Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s education officer. “Students need to feel engaged.”

At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the city’s south side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% met the mark. Federal aid allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers were paid to join in the recovery outside of work hours.

In the classroom, the school has placed a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students returned from school closures with lower maturity levels, said principal Vincent Izuegbu. By building lessons around discussion, officials found that students were more interested in learning.

“We don’t let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the topic,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth we’ve seen.”

Olorunkemi Atoyebi was a straight-A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade studying at home, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about interrupting class to ask questions. Soon, math classes stopped making sense.

When she returned to school, she had difficulty with multiplication and terms like “dividend” and “divisor” confused her.

While other students worked in groups, her math teacher pulled her aside for individual help. Atoyebi learned a song that she rhymes to help memorize the multiplication tables. Over time, it started to click.

“They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14 years old. “My grades started to go up. My scores started to rise. Everything felt like I understood better.

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Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chrissie Thompson in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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