The annual , released last month from the , found that while there’s some bright spots nationally compared to 2019 — including a growing number of children covered by health insurance and a decrease in teen pregnancies — many states are struggling to take care of children, whether it’s the number of children living in poverty, a growing number of teen deaths or older students who are not in school or working.

“When we look at the overall numbers, we see a somewhat mixed picture,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director of P-12 policy at , a national education policy group and grantee to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “But, when we actually break it down by demographics, we see that there continues to be very large gaps between racial groups, in particular with Black and Latino students … [and their] educational outcomes.”

Nationally, there was improvement in seven of 16 indicators, the report found. Of the remaining measures, six worsened since 2019 and three remained the same. In almost all 16 categories, however, American Indian, Alaska Native, Black and Latino children fared worse than the national average. 

The report found education topped the list for the weakest rebound in recent years with continued declines in reading and math proficiency for all demographic groups between 2019 and 2024; and a smaller percentage of children attending preschool across the country. 

Using federal NAEP test data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the report found 70% of American fourth graders in 2024 were not reading on grade level, worsening from 66% in 2019 “[and] essentially undoing a decade of progress.” About 73% of eighth graders are not proficient in math either.

Black, American Indian, Alaska Native and Latino students saw widening gaps compared to the national average and their white and Asian peers. In 2024, for example, about 84% of Black fourth graders and 90% of Black eighth graders were not performing on grade level in reading and math respectively compared to 61% of white fourth graders and 63% of white eighth graders.

Nationally, high school graduation rates have increased by one percentage point to 87% between 2018-19 and 2021-22, but similar to proficiency, most students of color lag behind the national average by between four to 13 percentage points.

“This really is indicative of the fact that we’ve had generations and generations of disproportionate resources going to students,” Munyan-Penney said. “We know that students of color and from low-income backgrounds have continually seen less investment in their schools and communities, and that is really borne out here in the data.”

Children of color disproportionately lived in high-poverty areas in 2019-23, with around 20% of Black and American Indian or Alaska Native, followed by about 11% Latino children, who lived in areas of concentrated poverty compared to 3% for white, Asian and Pacific Islander children. 

Most states fund public schools through local property taxes, so there’s often a direct correlation between concentrated poverty and struggling student achievement, Munyan-Penney said.

Disparities also extended beyond education – particularly with the number of child and teen deaths per 100,000. 

From 2019 to 2023, the number of kids and youth who died between the ages of one and 19 per 100,000 children increased from 25 to 29, with cause of death mainly from accidents, homicides and suicides. That figure for Black youth is nearly double the national rate, with a 30% increase between 2019 to 2023, from 41 to 53 deaths per 100,000.

State-by-state child well-being has also been a moving target.

While New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts topped rankings for overall child well-being, Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico scored the lowest. The report acknowledged that despite overall rankings, some states “show vastly uneven scores across domains,” including Maine, which scored overall at No. 17, but simultaneously ranked No. 41 in education or North Dakota which ranked first in economic well-being, but No. 42 in education. 

“Strong performance at the state … level can mask the reality that millions of individual children are still struggling to access the resources,” the report said.

Federal investments toward healthcare coverage and economic stability during the pandemic were credited in the report as sources of improvement in parental employment and children covered under health insurance. 

About 25% of children had a parent who lacked stable employment between 2019 and 2023, which improved by one percentage point. The report found financial aid, including pandemic relief funds in 2020-21 and an expanded child tax credit, helped “strengthen family financial security.” The report also found an increase of children covered by health insurance from 5% in 2019 to 6% in 2023 was an “encouraging milestone.”

But, these gains may too be in jeopardy in upcoming years as several pandemic-era supports expired and President Donald Trump’s administration has recently made cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

“The pullback in federal investment… is definitely a concern of mine,” Munyan-Penney said. “I’m not optimistic that these numbers will continue to go up unless we sort of see a change in the way that the federal government is approaching this and or we have very robust state investment.”

The findings stand in stark contrast to older elementary-school students, who appeared to show accelerated growth and were making up for lost learning over time, and have prompted concerns over the enduring impact of disrupted foundational years.

“We were shocked when we first saw the data. The toll that the pandemic took on these young learners is striking, and we need to pay more attention and prioritize them,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

“The data show that these students – these second-graders who were in preschool or were just toddlers during the pandemic – their learning was disrupted and now they are having a harder time recovering and, in some cases, are falling even further behind.” 

The Curriculum Associates report focused on how students who entered kindergarten through fourth grade in the fall of 2021 performed in math and reading over three years, and compared those scores against students who started prior to the pandemic. In doing so, researchers analyzed results from roughly 4 million students. The dataset is unique in that it includes younger children who don’t yet participate in federally-mandated state testing or the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which accounts for why most academic achievement data focuses on older grades. 

While the researchers found that younger students were either falling behind or consistently hovering below pre-pandemic levels in both subjects, they were most challenged by math. Students who were in second and third grade during the 2021-22 school year had bottomed out in their recovery, hovering below pre-pandemic achievement levels. Meanwhile, students who were in kindergarten or first grade at that time had been dropping further below historical trends. 

Even the younger students who were on grade level prior to the pandemic – a subgroup that generally showed less learning loss and quicker recovery times, including for the younger students in reading – were lagging significantly behind. And notably, they made less progress compared to their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they attended urban, suburban or rural schools. 

The same is not true of older elementary-school students in reading or math. Students who were in fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year, for example, were hitting pre-pandemic levels in reading and approaching them in math three years later in the spring of 2024.

Why younger students may be struggling 

“Our data don’t speak to the why,” Huff said. “But they do suggest that somewhere along the way these [younger] students did not pick up the foundational skills, the building blocks for reading and math – and especially math – that are crucial for their learning trajectory.”

Though the study was designed to show correlation and not causation, Huff and her team have a handful of working theories.

The pandemic in increasing enrollment in public preschools and kick-started a chronic absenteeism problem that continues today. Given that so many students missed out on pre-K or kindergarten – or received instruction virtually during those years – they may have missed a critical window of learning and development. And, research has long shown, less developed foundational skills can lead to the types of learning gaps the researchers found. 

Research also shows that certain moments in a child’s development are more sensitive to change than others. Children undergo between birth and age five, for example, but it can be . The pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime disruption. 

“For student learning, periods during which students build foundational skills – the skills most needed to advance learning – may be especially sensitive,” the researchers noted in their published findings. “Thus, disruptions during foundational skill development could create a compounding effect, making recovery a slow endeavor.”

Alongside that hypothesis is another: that the academic recovery efforts used by districts targeted students who were either further along in elementary school, or in middle and high school, or in grades participating in state exams. If that was the case, younger learners may have received less intervention support.

Of course, that’s virtually impossible to track given that districts allocated their state and federal pandemic recovery spending based on needs – staffing, tutoring, summer learning, social-emotional development, etc. – and not by grade-level. 

‘Math is a whole different story’

Angie Rosen, the director of curriculum and instruction at Little Silver Boro School District in New Jersey, says she knew right away that the small, high-performing school district had a problem when they brought back kindergarten and first grade students in November 2021. 

“Reading is one thing. Parents can read with kids. But math is a whole different story,” she says. “It’s more about understanding number sense, manipulating numbers and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

To blunt the pandemic’s impact, Rosen organized intense professional development for math instruction for first and second grade teachers. 

“We knew that parents wouldn’t teach math like we were teaching math, so that’s where we started,” she says. “We worked hard at it.”

Rosen says the key to getting their students back on track has been to obsess over their benchmark data to figure out where students have stopped making recovery and plug those holes.

“You have to look at where the gaps are, look at where it’s not measuring up, and then target it and address it,” she says. “You can’t do every grade level and every year in every subject. But I think that’s our success – we pay attention to the data and use it.”

To be sure, the Curriculum Associate data is the first of its kind to suggest that the county’s youngest learners are uniquely stalled out and, in some cases, falling further behind. Some researchers caution that the doomsday finding hasn’t been replicated by other robust analyses of post-pandemic academic loss and recovery – though that’s due to the fact that standardized testing data does not exist for such young students. 

Researchers from Curriculum Associates acknowledge at least some limitations to their methodology and findings, including that despite the large sample size, the data is not nationally representative, they did not use matched samples and did not track the same students pre- and post-pandemic. 

Huff says the data should be a shot across the bow for school districts to invest more recovery resources on their youngest learners.

“We now know their growth trajectory is very much dependent upon how prepared they were when they come into school,” she says. “We want these data to inform helpful, targeted policies and practice. These are data based on millions of students and we know that there are educators, districts and students out there who are bucking the trend.”

And here’s a twist: The same core difficulties are bedeviling teachers too.

The findings, contained in a new working paper, are believed to be the first to identify brain changes as an explanation for why students have suffered, both inside and outside the classroom, since the pandemic drove millions out of the classroom. 

, a Harvard University psychologist who studies the effects of stress on executive functions and who is the study’s lead author, said the new findings offer the first evidence to help us “understand the ‘why’” of the pandemic downturn — “what is actually causing all these issues that we’re seeing and talking about in the news.”

The paper, from the educational assessment and services company“, examines the cognitive skills of students nationwide and finds that, simply put, over the past several years, kids’ famously ever-changing brains have changed for the worse. 

Since the pandemic’s onset, students across all ages and economic levels have begun to demonstrate weaker memory and “flexible thinking” skills — those represent the mental bandwidth needed for multitasking, shifting from one activity to another and juggling the day’s demands. But for a few groups, such as younger and lower-income children, the changes have been more profound.

They also show that their teachers’ brains are weaker in almost identical ways, which could help explain high rates of frustration and burnout. They suggest school districts have their work cut out for them if they want to keep their best employees on the payroll and returning to the classroom each fall. 

Understanding the ‘why’ of pandemic downturn

The data come from a large, widely-used assessment, the , developed in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania. It consists of a series of cognitive tasks that measure subjects’ accuracy and speed in several major cognitive domains, including working memory, abstraction, sustained attention, episodic memory and processing speed. 

MindPrint has administered the assessment periodically to its clients over the past decade. The most recent rounds totaled 35,000 students and 4,000 teachers in 27 states.

By most measures, U.S. students are suffering. Last year, NAEP scores showed the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math dropping to levels last seen in the 1990s and reading levels dropping to 1971, when the test was first administered.

More recent research has shown that while older children are showing encouraging signs of academic recovery, younger kids aren’t making the same progress. Many students who weren’t even in a formal school setting when COVID hit are already falling behind — especially in math.

The Penn assessment found that children who attended elementary or pre-school during the pandemic and who are now 8 to13 years old showed the largest declines in memory. 

“Younger kids haven’t really developed a lot of these core cognitive skills,” Tsai said. “It hasn’t solidified for them, either through development or just through practice in the classroom. And so younger kids are more vulnerable to these pandemic shifts.”

But students across all age groups showed worse flexible thinking, which researchers now theorize contributes to lower academic performance — as well as challenging behaviors.

Tsai said kids from lower income backgrounds were more vulnerable to these changes, specifically in verbal reasoning and verbal memory, than their higher income peers, with bigger declines in verbal scores, which are highly correlated with academic achievement in all subjects.

Adults in the study had similar declines in both memory and flexible thinking, possibly explaining higher reported levels of and .

Nancy Weinstein, MindPrint’s CEO, said weaker flexible thinking isn’t necessarily a problem for experienced teachers who have developed strategies to cope with stressful situations and can modify plans on the fly. But those with less experience may be unable to change gears when lessons go astray or students act out in class. That may lead to higher teacher burnout.

Across the board, teachers’ skills suffered in areas such as verbal and abstract reasoning, spatial perception, attention and working memory, but they saw the greatest losses in verbal memory and flexible thinking.

“If we care about that, we need to know how to help them,” Weinstein said. “And there are some tried and true things you can do.”

She said schools should consider sharing data like this with teachers so they can understand that their frustration in class might not be due to students alone. That could make a big difference, she said, in “their willingness to put in the effort to change, as opposed to saying, ‘Why bother?’”

For students, Weinstein said, offering them more opportunities to practice skills with between study sessions could help. Schools should also consider “” techniques that break learning into chunks and address each individually.

Could such techniques help students — and teachers — regain a measure of pre-pandemic skills? Weinstein suggests the answer is “Yes.”

“The environment will matter, but certainly we can regain some of that if we do the right things,” she said. “And we know what the right things are to do.”

Crystal Green-Braswell, coordinator of staff wellness and culture for the Little Rock School District in Arkansas, said offering the Penn assessment to teachers and staff has helped many think more deeply about their work — and about their own thinking. 

“People who have had the assessment will say, ‘Now, you know my processing speed is slower — y’all are going to have to give me a moment,’” she said. 

That’s a huge change in a profession in which most workers have been asked “to take ourselves out of the equation and just get the work done,” Green-Braswell said. 

She sees offering such insights to educators as part of “rehumanizing” teaching. “When we provide this kind of assessment and we provide this kind of space for folks to actually get to know themselves, we are humanizing this profession and helping people to realize, ‘You play a role. You play an active role. You matter.’ ”

, released Tuesday by the nonprofit testing group NWEA, serve as more evidence of a trend that has stood out in earlier data: Students who were still in elementary school when the pandemic began are experiencing particularly worrisome setbacks as schools try to chart a path to academic recovery. Meanwhile, today’s elementary schoolers have nearly returned to the levels of learning last seen in 2019.

This summer, NWEA circulated scores from their widely used of math and reading. The results, which included the performance of nearly eight million American students from grades 3–8, revealed that today’s eighth graders were a full year behind 2019 learning in both subjects. By contrast, learning delays for third graders were only about one-quarter that size. 

In general, learning loss in science has been less significant than for core disciplines like math and reading because STEM instruction is comparatively limited in the early grades. In a 2018 survey, elementary teachers said they spent only 18 minutes each day focusing on science, compared with about an hour on math and 1.5 hours on reading. 

Susan Kowalski, an NWEA senior researcher who worked on the report, said the scores showed that students who experienced their foundational years of STEM instruction in 2020 and 2021 were now struggling to cope.

“If science is taught at all in elementary school, it’s in the fourth and fifth grades,” Kowalski reflected. “So in 2021, those were the kids who were hardest hit in science, and they are now seventh and eighth graders who have never really rebounded.”

The latest data is drawn from 621 public schools that consistently administered the MAP Growth Science test to the same grade levels between 2017 and 2024. This ongoing sample allowed the research team to measure students this spring against not only those in the pre-COVID period, but also during the initial phases of the pandemic, when tens of millions of students were receiving virtual instruction. 

Those results show that, by the spring of 2021, students across all tested grades had fallen significantly behind in science, with especially sizable learning losses mounting in grades 4 and 5. But elementary schoolers have since recovered the most ground compared with their same-age predecessors of three years ago, with learning gaps reduced by 50% for third graders, 82% for fifth graders, and 33% for sixth graders. Fourth graders, whose performance dropped the furthest during the early stages of the pandemic, have now fully returned to their 2019-era achievement levels in science.

But the gaps for older students — essentially, those who saw the biggest dips three years ago — have grown with time. In 2021, NWEA estimated that seventh and eighth graders would require 0.9 and 1.7 months of additional science instruction, respectively, to catch up to where similar students had been in 2019; by 2024, the projection for students in that grade had grown to 1.7 and 3.2 months of supplemental learning, respectively. 

In other words, kids’ whose initial encounters with science were thwarted by the COVID shock appear to be falling further behind, even as state and federal leaders have provided school districts with billions of dollars to lead recovery efforts. 

Heidi Schweingruber, the director of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s , said that students’ halting progress in science could constrain their life chances in the future. Adolescents begin to develop aspirations for college and career only a few years after they receive their first lessons in science.

“If they’re missing that foundation and can’t follow a strong pathway into high school science, are we closing doors for them in terms of what they might consider after graduation?” Schweingruber asked. “Middle school is the time when kids are starting to develop an identity of who they want to be.”

As other testing data have indicated previously, the pandemic also significantly widened achievement gaps separating students along racial lines. While middle schoolers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds had fallen behind in science by the spring of 2021, Hispanic students lost more ground than their white classmates. Among eighth graders, Hispanics required a projected 3.4 months of academic recovery in 2021 and 6.3 months in 2024; whites in the same age cohort needed 0.5 months of recovery in 2021 and 1.6 months now.

Black students, who have mostly bounced back from the science losses sustained in 2020 and 2021, are still, on average, between 10 and 15 months behind the average achievement levels for children in their grades. Hispanic students, whose progress has only stalled further since 2021, are almost as badly off. 

Erika Shugart, CEO of the , said in a statement that she wasn’t surprised to see negative impacts concentrated among middle schoolers, though she added that persistent gaps in STEM instruction could prove economically and socially destructive in the long run.

“The U.S. is already facing significant challenges producing a STEM-ready workforce,” Shugart wrote. “Science literacy is crucial for making informed decisions about health, the environment, and technology. Falling behind in science education can impair individuals’ ability to engage with and understand complex issues, affecting personal and societal well-being.”

To combat lost science learning, NWEA’s authors recommended different strategies to curb chronic absenteeism, entice students to participate in summer learning opportunities, and weave science instruction into middle school reading instruction, which could improve performance in both subjects.

Kowalski said that, more than any particular approach, educators needed to embrace a “mentality shift” away from remediation and toward learning acceleration. A former high school physics instructor, she argued that schools can’t get their pupils back on track simply by offering them what they missed four years ago.

“They can’t succumb to low expectations and say, ‘These students are behind, so I need to slow down.’ It’s more like, ‘These students are behind, so I need to accelerate.’”