Years After the Pandemic, the Lowest-Performing Students Are Still Significantly Behind

New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, indicate that four years after the onset of the pandemic lockdowns, American schoolchildren are still struggling to catch up to pre-pandemic achievement levels.

“Today’s NAEP results reveal a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears: not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind,” reads a Wednesday Education Department press release. “Change must happen, and it must happen now.”

These latest NAEP results looked at achievement for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math. Overall, test scores declined slightly when compared to 2022, the last time students were tested and still remained below pre-pandemic levels. However, the most revealing results came when separating student performance based on percentile. While students performing in the 90th or 75th percentile have mostly rebounded, declines for students performing the worst were much steeper. For example, fourth-grade math scores have returned to pre-pandemic levels for high-achieving students, while the lowest-achieving students have seen an eight-point drop in scores since 2019, declining from 199 to 191 on a 500-point scale.

It’s worth noting that the children currently being tested were quite young when the pandemic began. This latest round of testing happened in early 2024, meaning that the fourth graders were in kindergarten and the eighth graders were in fourth grade when lockdowns began. Unsurprisingly, the eighth graders were more severely affected by the score declines, especially in math. While fourth and eighth graders suffered the same average five-point decline since 2019, fourth-grade math and reading scores declined only three points while eighth-grade scores declined eight points.

What do these scores mean? In this year’s test, almost 1 in 4 eighth graders were “below NAEP Basic” in math, meaning that they didn’t even have “partial mastery” of the skills necessary to succeed in eighth-grade math. Around 1 in 3 eighth graders were below “NAEP Basic” in reading.

“If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Julia Rafal-Baer, a National Assessments Governing Board member and former assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, told the education-focused news website The 74. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”

These results show that, while children who were already doing well have managed to rebound from pandemic score declines, the children who are struggling have continued to face further difficulties, even as pandemic lockdowns shift further out of view.

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