Then the pandemic hit and “there were bigger fish to fry,” said Principal Beth Farmer.

But the state had a plan.

Teachers in those schools would receive two years of training in what’s known as the science of reading and use a new curriculum with explicit phonics instruction. Farmer has already seen the payoff: Seventy-five percent of third graders met the goal this year, with similar improvement in fourth and fifth grades.

“What appeared to be some penalty … has ended up being a gift,” she said.

The progress sunk in when she recently talked to a student after a quiz. “She said, ‘I was reading 14 words per minute, and now I can read 43 words per minute.’ When a kid can verbalize that to you, that’s real impact.”

Greenville, with roughly 77,000 students, is South Carolina’s largest district, so the results figure significantly into the state’s overall average. Fifty-four percent of third through eighth graders statewide scored proficient or above this year in English language arts — a big jump from the 45% of students at that level in 2019.

While most states remain behind, South Carolina and three others — Iowa, Mississippi and Tennessee — are recovering from or exceeding COVID-related declines in reading, according to researchers at Brown University. Iowa and Mississippi have also surpassed their 2019 performance in math. Experts say improvements in literacy instruction and an accelerated return to in-person learning are among the key policy decisions contributing to the rebound.

“I am encouraged to see some states surpassing 2019,” said economist Emily Oster, who leads Brown’s “This suggests substantial recovery is possible, and it provides an opportunity for learning.”

She said it’s “crucial” to understand what those states have done right.

In Iowa, more than 80% of schools offered in-person learning during the 2020-21 school year, according to state officials. In January of 2021, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law mandating that schools offer families in-person learning five days a week.

That’s likely one reason why the achievement declines in Iowa were not as steep as those in other states, said Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education. Between 2019 and 2021, the proficiency rate in English language arts dropped just 2 percentage points, compared with at least twice that much in several other states. 

Once more state results are released, Oster plans to match the data with the length of time schools were closed during the 2020-21 school year, as she did last year. The from the previous report was that states where schools were closed longer saw bigger drops in proficiency — as high as 20%.

In the other states, leaders overhauled the way students learn to read, a shift that is now showing up in test results. 

and were among the first states to adopt reform efforts that included a strong emphasis on foundational reading skills.

The turnaround in Mississippi — which in 2019 saw a dramatic leap in fourth grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — has garnered much attention and analysis. But a similar push was underway in the Palmetto State.

The state assigned reading specialists to schools that needed to improve, like Westcliffe. And it gave districts a list of recommended curricula. Greenville chose a program from , which Jeff McCoy, the district’s associate superintendent for academics, described as more “scripted” than the district’s prior approach.

“We recognized that phonics was a missing component,” he said.

The 2023-24 passed this year included $39 million to make a highly regarded training course — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling — available to all K-3 teachers. 

is a more recent addition to the states requiring training and curriculum on foundational reading skills. Its literacy law passed in 2020. The state also used relief funds for and high-dosage tutoring.

Dale Chu, a fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a policy consultant who focuses on assessment, sees an additional reason for achievement gains in Tennessee: Despite the pandemic, the state was less divided over education.

“Unlike any other state, they’ve largely had bipartisan continuity on education policy across three administrations,” he said.

Parent advocate Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, said the scores are good news for students in the early grades since Tennessee “spent several decades” in most educational rankings. But she’s less optimistic about older students’ opportunities to catch up. Many, she said, are “several grade levels behind.”

‘Give this some time’

Despite the positive developments, researchers and testing experts urge caution about interpreting the increase in proficiency rates as a sign of true recovery. 

Scott Marion, president and executive director of the Center for Assessment, said Oster provides “a pretty useful look” at where states stand. But assessments aren’t comparable across states; what counts as proficient in one isn’t necessarily the same in another. 

Overall proficiency rates also tell just part of the story. In South Carolina, for example, racial achievement gaps haven’t changed much. In 2018, there was a 45 percentage point difference in proficiency rates between Asian and Black students in English language arts. Now it’s 43 points. In math, the gap has actually increased — from 52 to 54 percentage points.

Additionally, some students never cross the threshold from one achievement category to the next, in terms of going from “does not meet expectations” to “approaches expectations,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research.

“I’m particularly worried about kids at the bottom, who were unlikely to be proficient before or after the pandemic,” he said.

In most states, proficiency rates in reading are still stuck below pre-pandemic levels. Scores in math are headed in the right direction; nearly all are “making progress,” according to Oster. 

But her summary serves as a reminder of how long it will take for some students to rebound, Chu said. “If you look at learning loss and what schools need to do to catch up, there’s no precedent,” he said. “The [education] system has never done this before.”

Despite billions in federal relief funds for tutoring, summer school and extra staff in the classroom, five states — Arkansas, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Nevada — have continued to lose ground in reading since 2019. The percentage of students scoring proficient or above dropped this year.

Minnesota, for one, is several years behind states like Mississippi in requiring reading instruction to include phonics. Just this year, the state passed the , legislation that provides $70 million for “science of reading” training and curriculum. 

Last month, the Minneapolis district’s disappointing literacy results sparked a at a school board meeting. 

“I would not say that it is a privilege to share this data,” Sarah Hunter, the district’s executive director of strategic initiatives, told the board. Since 2022, the percentage of district students who scored proficient decreased from 42% to 41% — the third consecutive year of decline. Board members blamed the pandemic and urged patience.

“I know our scores are still low,” said . “Let’s give this some time.” 

 Such comments left some advocates feeling uneasy.

“How do we hold districts accountable?” asked Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies in Minneapolis. “We have a lot of funding that goes to schools that aren’t doing well in literacy.”

He thinks the READ Act is a step forward, but doesn’t do enough to integrate literacy training and teacher preparation. 

“I don’t think we’re going to see improved outcomes in these first couple months,” he said. “I think we’re going to see improved outcomes in the next few years.”

Interim assessments are big business. The term covers a of designs and purposes, but broadly, these are exams administered at different points in the school year to gauge student progress. Usage is widespread, with the heaviest reliance in — those that serve the most marginalized and vulnerable students. Many educators make instructional changes based on the results, decisions that can have profound and lasting effects on the trajectories of countless learners.

According to the RAND Corporation, reported that their students had taken an interim assessment in the 2021-22 school year, and demand in this is growing. But while states’ end-of-year exams are thoroughly peer-reviewed, no such process exists for interim assessments. Further, publishers share very little evidence to show that their products are standards-aligned or can improve student learning. For educators, this means interim assessments are a black box, with no third-party reviews of publishers’ marketing claims.

This was the very problem our organizations — , a nonprofit providing free reviews of instructional materials, and the (Center for Assessment), an organization focused on improving the quality of educational assessment and accountability systems — sought to solve when we our plan to review commercial interim assessment products last year. 

Unlike EdReports’ of K-12 instructional materials, for which products can be purchased independently, access to interim assessments requires publisher consent, because their test questions, reports and other tools are proprietary. Most publishers declined our invitation to participate in our new reviews. Two did agree, but then one pulled out. It simply wouldn’t have been meaningful to release a single review without context, so we had to bring the process to a halt. 

Particularly in the current moment, with districts making high-stakes instructional and budgetary decisions to try to accelerate post-COVID student learning, publicly available, independent reviews of interim assessments could have been a powerful resource. The impossibility of moving our reviews forward should be cause for concern. But by sharing what we’ve learned, we hope to inspire educators to demand greater transparency from publishers. Even without independent reviews, there’s a lot that districts can do to become critical consumers before purchasing interim assessments.

First, determine their needs:

• What are their and overall goals for student learning in the relevant content area, and what should students therefore experience on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?
  
• What will assessments look like over the course of the school year? How will they with other instructional components to help educators understand and improve student learning?
  
• Based on the above, what do districts need in a commercial assessment product? What specific gap should it fill? If the district already has high-quality instructional materials, to what extent do their meet those needs?

Districts that do need a commercial product should get clear on what they want before looking at options:

• What is their main goal for the product? Do they want to evaluate school or district-level trends or help educators understand student progress in a specific learning area? While a publisher may claim that a product can do both these things equally well, in practice, that’s very challenging to achieve.
  
• What questions does the district expect the product to help answer, and what information is needed to answer those questions?
  
• How will the product meet the needs of its primary user? If it’s for teachers, how will the district know if it provides accurate information that educators can use to help students? What professional learning will users need in order to use the product in conjunction with instructional materials to support student learning effectively?
  
• How will the district know if the product is well-aligned to standards? What type of test questions should educators expect to see, and what evidence will confirm that the exams genuinely assess students’ understanding of the full depth of each standard? Districts should communicate their needs and ask for evidence. Equipped with a clear picture of their requirements, they can leverage their role as a current or potential customer to get the information and evidence they need.

Questions publishers should be able to answer include:

• What are the intended uses of your product, and what research supports those uses?
  
• How should assessment scores be interpreted, and what decisions can they inform? What evidence supports the idea that using the data in this way helps improve student outcomes?
  
• How were the product’s test questions evaluated, and were educators involved?
  
• Are all the test questions standards-aligned? If so, what evidence supports that claim?

In the absence of independent reviews, we encourage districts to take up the baton and exercise their purchasing power to press the assessment market for greater transparency. Students are counting on their teachers, administrators and educational leaders — they deserve evidence-based support to help them learn and grow.

Overall, the findings — from 8.3 million students in 25,000 schools — “point to a long road to recovery still ahead,” from nonprofit testing provider NWEA.

With the fourth pandemic school year approaching, the report underscores the need for urgent action to address learning loss, the authors wrote. MAP test data shows that it could still take three to five years — in the middle grades, more than five — to return to pre-pandemic performance. 

“It was a big question mark,” Karyn Lewis, director of NWEA’s Center for School and Student Progress, said about what to expect this year. “We were really hopeful at the beginning, but it was much more difficult than we thought it would be.”

Compared to a pre-COVID sample of students who took the assessments, reading scores are 2 to 4 percentile points lower and math scores remain 5 to 10 points lower. High-poverty schools, as well as Black, Hispanic, and indigenous students, are having a harder time bouncing back, the data shows. And, as other assessment experts have noted, reaching pre-COVID levels in math and reading does nothing to address long-standing achievement gaps.

‘Leaning in to those grades’

But NWEA’s findings also point to some hopeful patterns that weren’t present a year ago. The pace of recovery between fall and spring picked up compared to the 2020-21 school year. 

Performance in math, which declined the most last year, rebounded more than reading. And the gap between pre-pandemic and 2022 performance is smaller for younger students — whose scores declined the most in earlier results — than it is for those in the middle grades. 

Lewis said she and other researchers “hit home” on the negative effects of school closures on younger students and it “could be that schools heard that message and have been leaning into those grades specifically.”

She added that there’s evidence that “it was more challenging for younger students to learn in the absence of a classroom environment” and that maybe their growth has accelerated because of the return to school.

The results should help target students for additional instruction this fall, Lewis said. She added that while students typically experience a so-called “summer slide,” past research on summer learning loss is less reliable this year because of districts’ myriad tutoring efforts and other extra academic support, due to relief funds. 

The spring 2021 scores drew some districts to change how they organized students for teaching in reading and math this past school year. In School District 81, which serves Chicago’s Schiller Park neighborhood, Superintendent Kimberly Boryszewski said the needs were so great that what “used to be the exception had become the rule.”

Many students were two years below grade level, while some were still advanced. Teachers split students up into several groups to provide more individualized teaching at their level for the entire day. In one school, less than half of the second graders were meeting expectations at the beginning of the year, but by spring, 75 percent had made it.

“It tells me that model works for us,” Boryszewski said. “[Teachers] needed me to say, ‘Put the curriculum on the shelf and let’s teach the kids’ and to give them permission not to feel like they had to be on a certain page on a certain day.”

State results are mixed

The MAP results are meant to help teachers make decisions about which students need more support, but not to hold schools accountable for student performance. Such ratings will return to state report cards this year for the first time since the start of the pandemic. 

Parents and educators should also pay close attention to state test results because they reflect state standards, said Scott Marion, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Assessment. As with NWEA trends, state data so far presents of recovery. 

In , the percentage of third graders reaching level 3 — or satisfactory — did not change from last year and is still below 2019’s 58%. The results in English language arts across other grades are similar.

In math, students made gains over last year, but remain below . Across grades three through five, 62% of students reached level 3 in 2019, 52% in 2021 and 57% in 2022.

Texas officials point to additional funding for “learning acceleration” and legislation providing 30 hours of extra instruction for students below grade level as reasons why are meeting and mastering expectations in reading. 

But according to on the data from the Texas Education Agency, roughly 10% fewer tests were taken in 2022 than in 2019 and there was an increase in students changing schools — factors that “may have contributed to the increases in proficiency rates.” If students with disabilities or English learners were among those not tested, for example, that could skew the results higher. 

Tennessee was among the first to release this year’s state testing data, which shows that students are in reading than in math. 

The early state results, Marion said, show there are no easy answers to increasing performance for all students.

“If we know how to accelerate student learning at scale, why do we see these massive gaps that have persisted and gotten worse?” he asked. “If we really knew how to do this, were we just holding back?”

That was before the pandemic, before tests were cancelled in 2020, and before many parents opted their children out of tests in 2021. Because states now lack the year-to-year results they typically rely on to make decisions, determining which schools need the most help will be complicated.

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But the pandemic has made such determinations more important than ever. While incomplete, the data states collected last spring showed declines for students in reading and math, according to a summary from the New Hampshire-based Center for Assessment, and COVID-19 is now disrupting the third school year in a row.

“Let’s assume we have a normal year,” said Allison Timberlake, deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability at the Georgia Department of Education. “At best, we have strong ‘22 data, pandemic-impacted ‘21 data and no ‘20 data. How do we identify the right schools? The ones we identified before the pandemic are not necessarily the ones we should identify after the pandemic.”

Education advocates and civil rights groups say it’s important for states to resume the process of naming their lowest-performing schools so districts can best target resources, including federal relief funds. States identify those schools on annual report cards and mandate interventions from providing free tutoring to bringing in new leaders to turn schools around.

Fifteen organizations argued in a recent to U.S Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona that parents and educators need to know where their schools stand, urging him not to grant waivers from ESSA’s accountability provisions this Spring as he did last school year.

“We felt like we needed to put a mark in the sand,” said Jim Cowen, executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a nonprofit advocating for strong accountability systems. “This is very concerning from an equity standpoint.” An education department spokeswoman confirmed receipt of the letter and said officials welcome input from others.

The groups also noted wider interest in making long-needed changes to assessment and accountability systems, but argued that “now is not the time to open up the Every Student Succeeds Act to rethink the strong assessment requirements of the law.

“However,” they added, “we acknowledge a desire from diverse stakeholders across the country to consider new types of assessment systems and designs.”

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank and one of the groups signing the letter to Cardona, discussed some of those new approaches in on assessments released this week. Those models might get more attention as states emerge from the pandemic.

“This is not going to be the last time we have such a major disruption to education,” said Laura Jimenez, the director of standards and accountability at the Center.

The approaches include having students demonstrate what they know through complex projects and testing students on a sample of questions to reduce the amount of time schools spend on assessment. California, for example, has already announced to shave one to two hours off testing time next spring by giving shorter versions of the Smarter Balanced tests, which measure students’ knowledge of Common Core standards in reading and math. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday announced plans to retire the end-of-year Florida Standards Assessments and move toward a “progress monitoring” system throughout the year.

Uneven participation rates

Federal law requires states to test at least 95 percent of their students, but rates last year varied widely. In Georgia, participation ranged from a high of 79 percent in third grade to a low of 55 percent in high school, especially in the metro Atlanta area where schools didn’t open for in-person learning until later that spring.

“It is essential that these results be interpreted in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated learning disruptions, along with differences in participation,” said an Aug. 16 press release from the state education department. Georgia Superintendent was among those who argued against testing last school year.

Colorado — another state that saw over whether to test students last year — had participation rates of less than 60 percent in some districts. But other states, particularly in the South where higher percentages of students attended school in person, saw much higher rates. , and had statewide rates well over 90 percent.

Tennessee added an incentive to increase participation, exempting schools from receiving a grade or a ranking if they tested at least 80 percent of their students. Every district met or exceeded that goal, according to the state education department.

from the University of Missouri shows that a single year of missing data is not enough to throw off accurate measures of student performance trends at individual schools. But if two years of data are missing, it gets harder because in most cases, students would have either moved on from elementary to middle school or from middle to high school. Only the District of Columbia received for two years.

Similar challenges face states such as that opted to hold off on standardized testing until this fall.

“It takes time just to figure out which students are in which school,” the authors of a from the Center for Assessment wrote last January. They added that teachers and students aren’t ready for state testing in the fall, given the other activities involved in beginning a new school year.

Cory Koedel, an economist at the University of Missouri, said errors could result from using the data from districts that had low test participation last year. But he added it’s a mistake not to work with what’s available.

“That’s an error of pretending we don’t know anything” about student performance, he said.

Where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year — remotely, at school or combination of both — affected their performance and that’s important for the public to know, experts said.

They point to a recent report on as an example of how to provide a nuanced look at the impact of remote learning on results. Ohio State University researchers found that as in-person learning increased during the period from November through April, so did test scores.

In Florida, DeSantis’s plan to end the state’s existing testing program will likely draw more attention to newer models for assessing students. But Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, said the current federal law requiring states to test students every year hinders efforts to try some of the new approaches described in the Center for American Progress papers.

“You can’t have both innovation and strict accountability. Something’s got to give,” he said. The states he works with, he added, aren’t asking Cardona to completely waive accountability requirements as he did for the 2020-21 school year, but they are “saying we need some flexibility to do things differently.”