For Rachael Garnick, a former first grade teacher, the results were a reminder of how tough it’s been for schools to recover from historic declines in learning since the pandemic. 

“The literacy scores are still abysmal and we should be displeased,” said Garnick, who heads the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition. Made up of over 70 organizations, the group has pushed and state officials to fund and implement reading reform.

But despite the discouraging statewide results, she also sees districts, like in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Mohawk Area district, northwest of Pittsburgh, “trending in the right direction,” and demonstrating urgency over reading scores. Their attitude, she said, was “the opposite of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Instead, ‘It’s broke; we’ve got to fix it.’ ” 

on pandemic learning loss from NWEA, an assessment company, captured that combination of frustration and hope over the state of academic recovery. About a third of schools have reached pre-COVID performance levels in reading or math, and just 14% have recovered in both subjects. But even some that were hit the hardest, like high-poverty schools, have made impressive gains.

The report was just the latest collection of results pointing to a long road ahead for most schools. Last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed students in the majority of states losing more ground, but included a few standouts with strong progress, like Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math. And state test scores tell a similar story: few have topped pre-COVID performance.

It’s not like experts didn’t predict a slow recovery. 

“If student performance improvement follows historical prepandemic trends, it could take decades for students to fully catch up,” researchers with McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm, .

Even the nation’s education chief isn’t expecting good news soon. 

“I would like to say that NAEP scores, when they come out again in January 2027, are going to show marked improvement,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a recent K-12 Dive . “I don’t think they are.”

But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said it’s important to put NWEA data, and all measures of kids’ learning, in context.

“One of the reasons that we’re not seeing recovery and that the results aren’t better is because of what was happening in the decade ,” he said. “There was a slow degradation of academic achievement.”

Resisters and rebounders

Schools that were able to resist further declines during the pandemic are those that are more likely to be back on track, according to NWEA’s data, which represents five million students who took the MAP Growth tests through fall 2024. Such schools make up nearly three quarters of the recovered schools.

The Los Angeles-area is one example. 

Before the pandemic, the high-poverty, majority Latino district was already seeing gains on state assessments. When testing resumed in 2022, reading scores held steady. Math scores caught up the following year, and the district has continued to post gains ever since. 

Superintendent Darin Brawley highlighted a mix of academic routines, like a math problem of the day, weekly quizzes and challenging writing assignments, that the district continued despite the disruption of school closures. Teachers were encouraged to dial back their use of smart boards in the classroom and require students to keep math and language arts journals to improve retention. 

“Everything was being done on the smart board and kids weren’t notating anything,” Brawley said. “Certain things have to be worked out on paper.”

NWEA data also pointed to what the researchers call “rebounder” schools, those that saw significant drops in achievement but have been able to climb their way back. High-poverty schools are among those with impressive gains, but even districts seeing higher-than-ever performance still struggle to close wide achievement gaps.

“We’ve never had scores this high in English language arts or math,” said Buffy Roberts, associate superintendent of the Charleston County schools in South Carolina. “It’s been quite phenomenal.”

She was talking about , which, unlike NWEA and NAEP, aren’t comparable because states don’t all measure proficiency the same. But they can still reflect post-COVID trends if states haven’t changed their tests since 2019. 

South Carolina’s math test has remained constant. Results show that statewide, scores have nearly recovered. It’s a trend that NWEA noted as well, explaining that while schools “lost significant ground,” in math, many made “substantial gains afterward.”

In Charleston, 54% of students in grades three through eight met or exceeded expectations in math last year, up from 48% in 2019 and about 10 percentage points higher than the state average. The district also made the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research’s fully recovered districts in the nation last year.

Roberts pointed to a swift return to in-person instruction and high-dosage tutoring as some of the factors contributing to strong growth. But she said at the outset of the pandemic, leaders “knew there were some vulnerable groups” that would need “structures and support to mitigate some of that learning loss.”

The district’s , she explained, provided extra dollars to schools with high-poverty students even when the schools didn’t qualify for federal Title I funding. The schools used the funds for extra staff to reduce class sizes, incentives to increase attendance and mental health services.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. In fourth grade math, there’s a more than 50 percentage point gap between white and Black students, and students from wealthier families outscore students in poverty by 39 percentage points. 

“We agree that progress must be faster,” the district on Facebook after a conservative community group to the disparities. 

In an analysis of scores, Education Data Center researchers, led by Brown University’s Emily Oster, were hopeful about continued math recovery in 2026. Of the 32 states that have kept the same math test since before COVID, seven met or exceeded 2019 proficiency rates: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

But even if they didn’t, they all made some gains. Despite Pennsylvania’s decline in reading, for example, its performance in math is less than a percentage point from reaching the 2019 level. 

But the results in reading were less encouraging. Six out of 28 states have met or surpassed pre-pandemic performance. But several others, like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, remain well off that mark. 

Goldhaber, with CALDER, suggested that states haven’t seen improvement on tests because parents trust those scores less than the grades kids bring home on report cards and assignments. 

A recent reiterated that point. In a survey of over 2,000 parents, nearly three quarters said they believe grades more than tests when making decisions about their children’s learning. They’re also less likely to take action, like seeking out tutoring or other help for their child, when grades are good. 

The problem is that because of grade inflation, which was on the rise even before the pandemic, grades are a less accurate measure of how students are really doing. 

The results of that survey were no surprise to Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that focuses on helping parents understand achievement data. She said she’s been “screaming from the rooftops for 10 years” that parents are about their kids’ performance. 

“Good grades do not equal grade level,” she said. “Parents are deeply engaged, but we can’t afford to leave them on the sidelines relying on grades alone. The stakes are too high.”

The released by ImpactSTATS, Inc. and The BEE Collective used National Center for Education Statistics data to compare how often students were being excluded from school as a disciplinary measure at predominantly white versus Black Charleston schools in the 2022-23 school year.

To zero in on the treatment of young students, researchers considered only those schools that offered pre-kindergarten programs. Of the 42 schools in the study, 33 encompassed grades pre-K through 5; six went from pre-K to grade 8; two were pre-K to kindergarten and one school taught pre-K to second grade.

Of those schools, the ones with more than a 51% Black student population isolated children from learning settings for disciplinary reasons at a rate of 98.2 removals per 1,000 students, according to the report. This was seven times greater than the 14.1 removals per 1,000 students at majority white early-grade and elementary schools — and more than double the districtwide rate of 42.7 per 1,000 students.

Exclusionary discipline could include in-school or out-of-school suspensions and expulsion. When looking just at out-of-school suspensions in Charleston, the racial disparity by school population soared, according to the study released earlier this summer.

Students in majority Black schools faced out-of-school suspension rates of 78.8 per 1,000 students in the 2022-23 school year compared to 11.9 suspensions per 1,000 students for those in predominantly white schools. 

The districtwide rate was 34.8 suspensions per 1,000 students. 

“This tells us that we have a problem and it’s not children’s behavior — but adult action and adult decisions,” said lead researcher Melodie Baker. 

Charleston public schools served 50,312 students at the end of the last school year: 24,978 were white, 14,291 were Black and 7,916 were Hispanic, according to the district. 

Baker said removing a child from a classroom or isolating them from their teachers and peers robs them of an opportunity to learn self-regulation and is particularly damaging to the youngest learners.

“It makes kids feel like they don’t belong,” she said. “They feel ashamed. They feel confused. It affects their overall development.”

The practice is seen as : and are among the states that have banned or strictly limited such removals in the early grades.

Charleston County School District spokesman Andrew Pruitt last week pushed back against the study, which raises issues of racism and implicit bias, noting its data does not include the ages of the suspended students or the reasons why they were punished. 

“We take any report that raises concerns about unconscious bias negatively impacting our children seriously. However, we are incredibly concerned that a specific claim of that magnitude was made in the absence of an analysis of the appropriate and relevant data,” he said in a statement. 

The district didn’t start breaking down its disciplinary data by grade until recently, according to Pruitt. Though records were limited, he cited a total of 49 preschool suspensions in Charleston public schools in the 2022-23 school year. He did not separate that number by race.

Preschoolers across the U.S. are expelled at rates than K-12 students. South Carolina in preschool suspensions by a large margin in 2017-18 with 438 preschoolers suspended, according to the most recent available federal data. 

Those numbers have grown significantly worse in the Palmetto State and were a critical focus of . The Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children showing 928 South Carolina public preschoolers received in-school and out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24; 66% of those 3- and 4-year-olds were children of color and 77% were boys.

The committee’s data for Charleston County schools, the state’s second-largest district, cites that 25 preschoolers received out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24 and fewer than five received an in-school suspension. Eighteen Black Charleston County public preschoolers received an out–of-school suspension and fewer than five white students did. Twenty-one male preschoolers received an out-of-school suspension that year and fewer than five female preschoolers did. Six preschoolers classified as special education students were among those removed from school for disciplinary reasons.

The Charleston County School District has taken steps to address systemic inequalities in discipline, Pruitt said, including professional development training for all its early education teachers that focuses on how to appropriately respond to student behavior while taking into account young learners’ social-emotional well-being. He said the district continues to work with early childhood education organizations throughout the state to adopt best practices.

The report by ImpactSTATS and The BEE Collective notes citing the role of educator bias in harsh discipline, including perceptions of Black children as being older than they are, less innocent, more aggressive and more deserving of punishment for the same behavior displayed by white students.

New York-based was founded by Baker in 2023 to bring more diversity to the research field and to provide technical support and research assistance to grass-roots groups working with underserved communities of color. 

The BEE — Beloved Early Education and Care — Collective is that partly funded the study and collaborated on the research. It seeks to improve maternal and child health in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, including in addressing racism and implicit bias in early child care. 

Black children across all grade levels and those with disabilities have long faced higher rates of exclusionary disciplines than other student groups. According to analyzing data from the 2020-21 school year, Black boys were nearly two times more likely than white boys to receive an out-of-school suspension or an expulsion.

“It’s mostly boys who are being suspended — mostly for rough-and-tumble play,” Baker said, speaking anecdotally of the Charleston suspensions after interviewing those who worked with or observed district students. “But there’s a lot of research out there that talks about the positives of rough-and-tumble play. Males tend to perceive that very differently.”

Of Charleston County schools’ 3,673 teachers in the 2021-22 school year, roughly 2,402 were white females, 556 were white males, 404 were Black females and 103 were Black males, according to .

Cara Kelly, a researcher who observed classrooms within the Charleston district for seven years, ending in 2019, recalled several instances where kindergarten children were made to sit alone and in silence for 30 minutes or more for minor infractions such as talking to other students, calling out while a teacher was speaking or standing up when they were supposed to sit for long stretches of time. 

“It’s OK to give a child five minutes to calm down — but not to be completely excluded,” she said. 

Kelly, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oklahoma’s Early Childhood Education Institute, told ����Ӱ�� she believed the punishments were not developmentally appropriate and often targeted Black children. 

The report recommends the district recruit more male teachers in the early grades, increase pay for all early childhood educators, decrease student-to-staff ratios and raise awareness about discipline reform legislation that seeks to prohibit suspensions, expulsions and corporal punishment while promoting more effective means of managing student behavior. 

Researchers acknowledge that the report, funded partly by the American Heart Association Voices for Healthy Kids, should be interpreted cautiously because of the data’s limitations regarding race and age.

The BEE Collective has filed a public records request asking the Charleston district to release the suspension records for children 5 and under for the last five years broken down by age, race, gender and school. Noting that the response to that Freedom of Information request is due Aug. 31, Pruitt said it was “unfortunate” that the groups moved ahead with publishing the report without that information in hand. 

Tawanna R. Jennings, an infant and early childhood mental health consultant for South Carolina’s Partners for Early Attuned Relationships Network, called the study’s findings “pretty astounding,” adding she hopes the results will be shared widely and that Charleston teachers receive better training and greater support.

“There needs to be more resources so that [teachers] can understand these behaviors,” she said. “How do you teach these children and how do you be empathetic with what they may be experiencing?”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ImpactSTATS and to ����Ӱ��.

Roughly 85,000 Afghan nationals have arrived in the United States as part of , President Joe Biden’s August 2021 initiative to aid those who worked alongside American military personnel and who were forced to escape after the U.S.’s .

It’s unclear how many of these refugees are school-aged but of those held at U.S. military bases upon arrival last year were children — and more are en route, according to the Department of Homeland Security. They’ve landed everywhere from Fremont, California, to Northern Virginia where Afghan expats can be found in numbers. 

Refugee resettlement workers and teachers alike say these students’ needs are unique: Some hail from highly educated families while others never before had the opportunity to attend school. 

Many Afghan girls lag behind the boys — even their own siblings — and most, no matter their gender, trail their U.S. peers. 

Despite this, their transformation has been remarkable, said Kathleen Renfroe, school liaison for the Fredericksburg Migration and Refugee Service office for Catholic Charities.

Renfroe enrolled between 120 and 140 Afghan children this past year alone. She said one student, a 14-year-old girl, was discouraged from attending school in Afghanistan — and in Virginia: The child was instead expected to marry and start a family, Renfroe said. 

But school officials alerted her parents to compulsory education laws — and to their daughter’s potential.

“Cultural pressures can be difficult,” Renfroe said. “We helped them understand that here in this country, we encourage education and that it’s not a barrier to later becoming a wife and mother.”

In the end, not only was the teen excited about the possibility of furthering her education and prospering in a career of her choosing, but her mother was, too: She knew her daughter could achieve more here than she could at home, where girls are now being kept from school beyond their elementary years.

In another case, a child with spina bifida, who would likely receive no education in her home country because of her disability, has flourished in America: She recently completed a month-long STEM program that had all students learning about aerodynamics, computers and virtual simulations. 

She was so thrilled to participate that she skipped breakfast every morning because she worried it would make her late to class, Renfroe learned through her mother. 

“She had never seen her daughter so excited,” Renfroe said. “Her mom was really grateful. It was the first time she felt like a 12-year-old child.”

Texas

Nazia Sadat, a mother of three who lives with her family 30 minutes outside Houston, understands the joy that comes after a difficult transition. 

Sadat does not speak English and neither did her children upon arrival in August 2021, making the last school year particularly difficult.  

“All of them were very sad at the beginning to go to school,” Sadat said through a translator. “They couldn’t understand anything, but the teachers really helped them. They used Google Translate to understand what they said. They were loving, caring and helped them every day. In this one year, my children became very happy. They changed a lot from the beginning.” 

A relative of hers, Kaynat Sadat, who lives nearby with her husband and three children, said her 7-year-old daughter Esra struggled with the loss of friends and family back home. All three kids clung to their mother and cried on and off  throughout the day last summer. 

School softened their loss, said Kaynat, who is fluent in five languages, including English. But even with her advanced education — she earned a law degree in Afghanistan in 2015 — Humble Independent School District’s policies were new to her and difficult to navigate. 

“When we came, we didn’t know how the system worked,” she said. “But everyone was so helpful. In this one year, they never let us alone. The school asked about everything, gave every information — and we attended every program they had. I appreciate all they did for us. I feel I have a family here.”

Nazia Sadat’s children, who attend Fort Bend Independent School District, remember the difficulty of those early days in America, how they were unable to communicate with their classmates. 

“When I first got here, I couldn’t talk to them,” said 11-year-old Mudasir, who also speaks Pashtu and Dari. “By wintertime, I was able. The kids are pretty friendly. If you say, ‘Can you play with me’, they will play with you.”

Asia, his 8-year-old sister, recalls being unable to answer what now seems like the simplest question. 

“My friend asked me, ‘What is your name?’” she said. “I didn’t know what she meant.”

Now, the little girl has an American best friend.

“When we go to recess, we always play together and talk,” she said. “We sit on the swings and go play on the monkey bars.”   

Nazia Sadat is hopeful her children will go on to college, that her son will make good on his pledge to become an engineer and that her daughter will pursue medicine. 

“The main reason why I came here and am happy here is that I want my children to be educated,” Sadat said. “Especially my daughter.”

South Carolina

While she’s embraced American values, other families are reluctant to adapt to such a stark change. 

Claudia Newbern, assistant principal at the Charleston County Newcomer Center in South Carolina, doesn’t want to lose Afghan students — particularly, girls — to the shock of the American school system. 

Their interaction with men and boys back home is largely forbidden, so walking into a massive building filled with both goes against everything they’d been taught. 

Newbern, careful not to rattle them so much that the students drop out, tries to familiarize them and their parents with their new surroundings: Some adjust easily while others struggle for months. 

Three teenage sisters who arrived in the district in February were particularly distressed by the American system. They hail from a conservative family whose values clashed with their school’s.   

“They were petrified,” Newbern said. “It was all very shocking for them.”

The district itself is enormous: It serves 49,000 students in 88 schools and specialized programs. Some 6,000 students are multilingual learners.

Recognizing their difficulty in navigating such a large school environment, the sisters were led around by a chaperone for much of their first two weeks on campus. And when they grew anxious around a male art teacher — he was friendly and accommodating but nevertheless such proximity made them uneasy — Newbern moved the trio to a class led by a woman. 

It wasn’t the only unusual adjustment. The girls’ teachers had already asked male students to keep their distance during their first months of school, a request the boys were glad to honor: Newcomers themselves, they know how difficult it is to absorb foreign customs. 

“We didn’t want them so overwhelmed that they didn’t go to school,” Newbern said.  

The early accommodations paid off: The girls are thriving. While they are still struggling to learn English — they had only limited schooling at a young age — they are happy inside classrooms led by male teachers and interact with ease around all students, Newbern said, including the boys they once avoided. 

All three want to attend college with two deciding on career fields. One plans to be a nurse and another a teacher. 

And they make frequent use of a prayer room designed for those students who must pray during school hours. 

The sisters are surrounded by their peers for much of the day but spend lunchtime in the library where they can sit on the floor, much as they would at home. Newbern was honored, recently, when the girls asked her to join them. It was an informative interaction: That’s how the administrator learned one of them, age 17, is married and that her husband remains back home.   

“I asked, ‘Do you miss Afghanistan,’” she said. “They said, ‘A little. Here better.’”

The Taliban has kept most girls out of school beyond the sixth grade. Some secondary schools have to them in the eastern part of the country, but their future remains uncertain. 

College-age women also are under threat. Those who chose to continue with their studies from their male peers. have erupted over the restrictions but large-scale disruptions are too dangerous for participants. 

, which promotes academic freedom around the world, has found that women have not been , that scientific conferences and other programs are gender segregation and that some for not attending prayers. 

The organization, launched at the University of Chicago in 1999, has relocated thousands of scholars to safer parts of the world through the years: It received more than 1,500 applications from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover — including 20% from women. In a typical year, SAR receives 500-700 applications worldwide. 

“To have restrictions around their ability to teach and/or research is an incredible loss — not only to women in Afghanistan, who have hard-won their academic accomplishments despite myriad pressures, but also to the academic community inside the country which will now be stifled and missing these vital voices,” said Rose Anderson, director for Protection Services at SAR. 

Virginia

Tim Brannon, principal of the International Academy at Alexandria City Public Schools, said the number of Afghan students in his program has risen dramatically in the past five years: They accounted for roughly 25% of the population in 2017-18, but nearly half now, on par with Spanish-speaking students. The district currently serves 752 Afghans total — including 510 recent arrivals.

Brannon said the students, having seen the district honor its Latino population with cultural celebrations, asked that they have an opportunity to explain the Islamic holidays of Eid and Ramadan to their peers. During an April assembly, the students gave a brief presentation on Ramadan and did some traditional dances and, roughly a month later, shared a second presentation, teaching their classmates about the end of Ramadan and the celebration of Eid.

Brannon said the only discernible difference between Afghan students and their classmates is that the Afghan kids approach school officials as a group. 

“When one kid has an issue, they come to the office as six,” he said. “They want to show up for their friends.” 

The Afghan students’ presence, he added, has only made the school community richer. 

“We have people from everywhere with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences and they all bring something positive to this school,” he said. “It’s a chance for us to learn from — and about — somebody from a different culture and that adds to our knowledge of the world and our place in it.”