In eighth grade reading, the percentage of students on grade level or above in those schools grew at three percentage points over last year — from 36% to 39%. In math, the percentage of fourth graders on track in majority-Black schools grew from 36% to almost 40%, the latest i-Ready assessments from Curriculum Associates found.

Those are “bright spots” in a snapshot that otherwise shows recovery has remained stagnant five years following the pandemic, said Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates. 

Black students “had a bigger dip, especially in the early grades, so they have more room to catch up,” she said. But generally, performance has plateaued and there’s still a long way to go to reach 2018-19 levels. “I think we have to hold ourselves accountable to at least that bar, but that’s not the end goal.” 

The 2024-25 data, shared exclusively with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, represents almost 12 million K-8 students in reading and more than 13 million in math who took the i-Ready tests during the last school year. Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the i-Ready adjusts questions to students’ level. The prompts are more advanced if kids are working above the benchmark and easier if they’re below, offering teachers a view, Huff said, of how much progress students need to make to catch up. Nearly half of fifth graders, for example, are on grade level in reading, while 29% are two grade levels or more below, the results show. The picture is similar in math, with 53% on target and 20% far behind.

While students are learning, they’re not mastering as much material as their peers did before COVID. Learning loss is more pronounced in the younger grades, confirming that even those students who were too young to attend school were affected by the disruption. Multiple studies have shown that economic hardship and fewer opportunities to socialize left less prepared for school. In reading, 60% of first graders — those who were toddlers during the early years of the pandemic — are on grade level. That’s down from 68% in 2018-19.

‘Slight improvement’

Majority-Black schools, however, were well behind majority-white schools before COVID — by roughly 20 percentage points. Their scores also saw a steeper drop off after the pandemic. 

About a year after the pandemic, McKinsey &Company, a consulting firm, used i-Ready data that students in majority-Black schools were a full year behind those in predominantly white schools, an increase of three months over the prior achievement gap.

“Black students were often at the lowest achievement levels in many districts,” said Kareem Weaver, co-founder of Fulcrum, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that provides literacy expertise to school districts. “It makes you wonder what was happening before for students to be at a level where even slight improvement is considered noteworthy.”

If students don’t acquire strong reading skills and basic math facts in elementary school, they won’t be able to keep up with more challenging assignments, said Ameenah Poole, who worked as a high school administrator in East Orange, New Jersey, until 2022. Her former colleagues, she said, often wondered why students came to them as struggling readers and lacking proficiency in math. 

“These foundational skills are paramount,” said Poole, now principal of Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary in the district. 

In a school already not meeting expectations under the state’s accountability system, the pandemic just put kids further behind. Many parents in the 84% Black school have jobs in the service industry. Some are nurses, one drives an Amazon truck, Poole said, and most parents didn’t work from home when schools went remote.

A lot of students didn’t even log in to class, and rebuilding attendance routines has been slow and sometimes futile, she said.

“The culture during the pandemic and post-pandemic [was] that school was an option,” she said. “We say, ‘If you miss a day, you miss a lot.’ Students have to be here in order for us to teach them.”

On New Jersey’s state test, 19% of third graders met the standards in reading in 2022. That’s the same year the district began using i-Ready. Students work on skills like phonics and vocabulary or measurement and geometry in 40-minute blocks every week. 

At first, the extra instruction didn’t translate into higher scores. In fourth grade, the percentage of students reaching the proficient level actually fell to 11%. But when those same students were fifth graders in 2024, Poole began to see the payoff. Thirty-five percent met or exceeded the goal. 

That still means the majority of students are working below grade level, which the i-Ready data also shows. 

Student learning is “moving in the right direction,” said Huff with Curriculum Associates, “but it’s not accelerating fast enough.”

The way the i-Ready results are reported, however, could be hiding some improvement, suggested Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. 

Identifying the total percentage above and below the threshold doesn’t capture those students who may have moved up a level or two over time. Districts are “far from full recovery,” he wrote in an from 28 states. But he concluded that $190 billion in COVID relief, the largest-ever one-time infusion of federal funds for schools, contributed to a significant increase in math performance during the 2022-23 school year. 

Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham City schools in Alabama, saw evidence of that in his district.

“I told the teachers, ‘You [will] have to teach like you’ve never taught before,’ meaning that we had to make up multiple grades within a year because of unfinished learning,” he said. 

A 2024 Curriculum Associates showed that Birmingham, where 89% of students are Black and 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University the district for the same reason.

Leaders rearranged the calendar so that at the end of every nine-week session, students had a week off. But teachers provided optional instruction during that open week. About 7,000 students participated “when they didn’t have to come to school,” Sullivan said. “We’re seeing the fruits of that.”

That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that’s a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That’s the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates’ of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers’ workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

“The future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,” said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates’ head of assessment and research. “It is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.”

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher’s popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do. 

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can’t just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media — watching, listening and reading in equal measure — to understand what they’re learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child’s abilities, since in all but the most special cases there’s little space between a child’s thoughts and his or her utterances. “It’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,” said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox’s chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates “confounding factors” that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students’ voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what’s on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids’ understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children’s learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids’ voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

‘They shout, they whisper, they sing’

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

“Suitably impressed,” Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn’t actually mastered the material — she’d simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. “She had learned to hack the game,” Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter’s ingenuity — but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to “invisibly and continuously” quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can’t hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: “They shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,” she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary “voice engine” that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon’s Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in “grown-up” situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren’t built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox’s CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox’s AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

“If it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,” said Kelly.

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI “can be the great equalizer here,” she said. “I think it can help solve the literacy crisis — but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.”

The terms of the November sale weren’t disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it’s still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she’s eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity — especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, “I don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently” when a particular student says it. “But I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

As instructional leaders in our district, we are fortunate to spend lots of time in classrooms. Cathy loves to share the story of popping in on one fourth-grade lesson to observe student writing. The room was cool, dim and quiet; the only sound was the scratch of pencils on paper as students brainstormed ideas for the poems they were going to write, a culminating task to wrap up an EL Education module on poetry. The teacher circulated as students pondered topics that were especially important to them — topics that were worthy of an entire poem.

One word at the center of a student’s brainstorm was particularly striking: “education.”

We lead literacy work in our district, Murfreesboro City Schools, located about 30 miles south of Nashville in the geographic center of Tennessee. We’re a district of 13 schools serving students from preschool through 6th grade.

Our journey implementing a new literacy curriculum, , has been rewarding, though filled with twists and turns. It began in 2019, when only about a third of our students showed English proficiency on our state assessment. With teachers creating their own materials at the time, just deciding to implement a core curriculum represented a big shift. Teams of educators across the district worked together to select EL Education. Books and ancillary materials were purchased and delivered to schools and classrooms. Then COVID hit — midway into our first year of this new district-wide curriculum.  

The ensuing two years looked like they did elsewhere: navigating virtual learning, hybrid instructional models, absences due to illness and quarantines and the myriad other challenges the pandemic thrust into education. Teachers were stretched incredibly thin, and implementing a complex curriculum was even more challenging against this backdrop than it would normally have been. In our first year of state testing after COVID, we saw an expected decrease in student proficiency.

Coming out of the pandemic seemed like the perfect time for a reset around the use of our new curriculum: a time to cast a wider vision, set new and lofty goals, restructure systems and focus our efforts on deeply understanding the materials and bringing them to life in the classroom.  

Over this past year, we’ve focused heavily on deepening our understanding around foundational skills instruction. The Tennessee Department of Education to provide all teachers with sounds-first instruction aligned with the science of reading, and 99% of our district’s primary teachers and academic interventionists have completed this training. A great effort has been made by district leaders to ensure all foundational skills instruction aligns to the EL Education curriculum and the science of reading, ensuring teachers used a systematic, explicit phonological awareness and phonics approach. Our teachers are already seeing the impact of a sounds-first approach with a strong foundation skills curriculum.

“Student writing is far better than I’ve seen before,” kindergarten teacher Kim Taylor said. “I’m amazed at what my students are writing.”

We also created a protocol for educators to clarify the process by which teachers prepare to utilize the materials. Called the Prepare to Teach Cycle, it begins with a high-level overview of the unit of study: reading and annotating core texts; exploring the essential questions; articulating the knowledge students will gain and the thinking they will need to do on an anchor chart. Then, we take the assessments ourselves and explore the thinking that’s required for students to perform well and common misunderstandings that may hinder that success; we add these thinking demands to the chart as well. With this chart and student texts front and center, we then work to internalize, and sometimes, rehearse lessons together to deeply understand the purpose of the lesson and the teaching priorities required to accomplish that purpose. Last, we teach and reflect by looking at student work or instructional data from the , our walkthrough tool.

The entire Prepare to Teach protocol lives in an environment of teacher voice; they set enabling conditions such as choosing when to meet, how often, how long, what pre-work will be done, team roles, and the like. We’ve seen the cycle impact student work and teacher practice. As one teacher reflected, “I think for us to truly do this job effectively, we have to be together, planning together and talking through what we notice in different lessons. [The cycle] made me confident in my own abilities.”

Finally, we streamlined everything we do to consistently embed our work in the materials. All of our professional learning, cross-district teacher literacy networks, and school-based conversations are grounded in the materials. We talk a lot about how to keep the text at the center of instruction, how to focus on the knowledge students should get from the texts and how to provide just the right support so every student has access to — and the opportunity to truly grapple with — complex work.

That grappling is already paying off. In the spring of 2022, our students’ proficiency levels were the highest we’ve seen in our district since we adopted new standards in 2017, outperforming our pre-pandemic levels. This lines up with the reading, writing and conversations we see on a daily basis in classrooms.

“I think with this curriculum, it’s making those students really feel like they can be world changers and that they can access it,” said third grade teacher Bailey Rose. “We don’t have to lower it. We give it to them as it is, they are able to take it and feel like they can have an impact.”

Here in Murfreesboro, we still want to grow and improve, but we are well on our way and have a strong plan to get there.  And those poems — they were something else. Education, indeed.

But the results from Curriculum Associates, which publishes the I-Ready assessments, also reveal how much work remains to be done: Fewer children in the early grades are developing essential phonics skills, they found. In fact, even more were below grade level in the spring of 2022 than there were a year ago — in third grade, 27%, compared to 24%.

The results in math reflect a similar trend. Performance for some students is not only below what it was in the years before schools shut down; it’s worse after a year of mostly in-person learning. In grades five through eight, for example, fewer students than ever are developing essential math skills like understanding place value, multiplication and fractions. 

“That first year back, they didn’t recover all the way,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates. 

Last year, teachers had more students below grade level than ever, Huff said, and the “whole classroom dynamic changed.” Foundational math and reading skills “are the two bridges where we’re seeing those gaps endure.” 

The findings follow the recent release of long-term achievement data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which revealed sharp declines in reading and math for the nation’s 9-year-olds. I-Ready, with results in first through eighth grade, serves a different purpose than the so-called “nation’s report card.” But the takeaways are similar: The pace of recovery is slow, and those who were struggling before the pandemic have the steepest hill to climb, particularly Black and low-income students.

Among I-Ready’s more encouraging signs, however, is that schools serving a majority of Black and Latino students saw the greatest gains in fourth grade in both reading and math. From a sample of almost 5,000 schools, over 300 exceeded expectations, despite serving students at least two years behind. Experts say the results show the need for well-targeted academic support.

“We don’t necessarily say everyone needs acceleration in all subjects for the next five years, but some kids will,” said Libby Pier, chief of staff at Education Analytics, a Madison, Wisconsin, nonprofit that monitors state data. “There are certain skills, certain students and certain schools where things are looking less or more dire.”

‘Wanted the data to tell us’ 

In the testing field, I-Ready is known as a diagnostic assessment — used to identify what students know and where skill gaps remain. After states canceled annual tests in 2020, schools relied more on I-Ready and similar assessments to better understand the pandemic’s impact. 

“They have continued to play an important role in providing more timely information to schools about recovery efforts,” Pier said. 

At Blakesburg Elementary School, among those s where students scored better than expected, Principal Tammy Davis began using I-Ready to monitor students’ reading comprehension skills and supplement a state test that focuses on fluency.

The school is located in a farming community in southeast Iowa. About 30% of students are low-income, and even though the school distributed Wi-Fi hotspots, many students lacked reliable internet during remote learning. After seeing “huge dips” in reading and math when schools reopened in the fall of 2020, teachers examined every student’s score on each category of the assessment. 

“I had a feeling where we were the lowest, but I wanted the data to tell us,” Davis said.

To build comprehension skills, teachers never stopped devoting time in the school day to social studies and science — even though many districts prioritized math and reading, said April Glosser, curriculum director in the Eddysville-Blakesburg-Fremont Community School District.

“If you’re reading something that you have nothing to connect to, it’s never going to make sense to you,” she said, pointing to a passage on the sport cricket. 

Teachers, she added, began to do more “think alouds” explaining  to students what to do if they ran into words or phrases they didn’t recognize or understand. The school’s sixth graders, who have always struggled, Davis said, saw significant growth, from 35% proficient in spring 2021 to  56% proficient last school year. Schoolwide, 74% were proficient, getting closer to the goal of 80%.

Emerging state results

Students at Blakesburg spent most of the 2020-21 school year in person, but that wasn’t the case in many other districts. Asstates begin to release test results from last school year, researchers plan to further examine links between remote learning and student achievement.

Also Tuesday, Brown University economist Emily Oster released of state test data confirming that learning loss was greater in districts that had more remote and hybrid instruction.

In Virginia, for example, just 5% of students attended districts with “high levels of in-person instruction” during the 2020-21 school year. In 2021, the percentage of students reaching proficiency in math and English language arts was 20.5 percentage points lower than in 2019. This year, it was still 12 percentage points lower.

In Louisiana, almost two-thirds of students learned mostly in person in 2020-21. Proficiency levels in 2021 and 2022 were 5.5 and 4.1 percentage points below 2019, respectively.

“Districts that had more remote learning during the pandemic have a much longer way to go,” Oster said in a statement.

In what could be a bellwether for schools across the U.S., young students in the nation’s fourth-largest school district are doing poorly on basic academics, recent data suggest, a key sign that pandemic schooling is taking a bracing toll.

Officials with Florida’s earlier this month reported that 43 percent of students who took January diagnostic tests in grades pre-K-3 tested below grade level in reading. And 54 percent tested below grade level in math.

Students in both at-home and in-person settings took the online tests.

The district educates some 334,000 students, more than nearly every district in the U.S., with the exception of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

An assessment expert said the Miami-Dade findings will likely be repeated nationwide as districts assess students more fully, and may actually underplay the extent of the crisis.

“The national trends are pointing in a direction at least as severe as what’s happening in Miami-Dade, and likely more severe,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, a Massachusetts-based firm whose tests are used in schools in the district and elsewhere nationwide. “These numbers from Miami-Dade are deeply troublesome, but the national picture, I think, is much more troublesome.”

The Miami-Dade findings are the latest to emerge in large districts nationwide since the school year began. Elsewhere, districts and advocacy groups have rung similar alarms. In Los Angeles, the group in late March issued a report that said the city’s children are in “an unprecedented educational crisis.” In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, officials in November said the percentage of middle- and high-school students earning F’s in at least two classes in the first quarter last fall.

Nationwide, the consulting firm McKinsey that U.S. students by this fall may have lost as much as a year of learning.

Miami-Dade school board member Mari Tere Rojas, who requested the testing data, noted that the problem is worse among older students, the Miami Herald . While just 15 percent of pre-K students tested behind grade level in reading and 13 percent in math, among third-graders the data showed that 27 percent were behind in reading and 40 percent in math.

that among third-graders nationally who took Curriculum Associates’ iReady tests last winter, 41 percent were below grade level in reading and 68 percent in math.

Among these students, another 22 percent were two or more grade levels below where they should be to do grade-level reading work, while 18 percent were two or more grade levels below in math.

About 8 million students take the iReady tests, according to the company’s .

The district is already moving to limit the damage from the past year or more of disruption. Lissette Alves, Miami-Dade’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, told the school board on May 12 that students identified as performing below grade level in reading based on a September assessment are already receiving more help, which can amount to an extra 30 minutes of daily reading or, in worse cases, an additional hour of intensive reading instruction.

They’re also planning to scale up an intensive reading and math summer school program for more than 65,000 students, with plans to use federal Covid relief funds to get students tutors and other kinds of extra help.

Miami parent Kimberli Nelson said her son Maddox, a first-grader at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Coral Gables, Fla., is “doing well with school from an academic perspective. But he pretty much just learned to sit quietly and draw pictures all day.”

Nelson said her son, who has been identified as gifted, had more difficulties with the “psychological element” of school disruption. To fight isolation, she said, “We had to just break out” and visit friends.

Nelson, a Black parent who grew up in Chicago, said the pandemic has been doubly hard for poor students, as well as students of color. Many of these students, she said, have parents who are essential workers and can’t supervise their at-home learning. “We’re having two pandemics, based upon race and poverty.”

The new achievement data were first reported by the Herald. Miami-Dade officials have said that one of their biggest concerns revolves around the estimated 10,000 students who for school — as well as 10,300 online-only students identified as at risk of failing.

In January, the district sent letters to at-risk students, urging them to return to in-person school. Of 5,400 contacted, about 3,600 have returned to classrooms.

The district did not respond to a request for comment. In March, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the school board that about 500 students remained missing, the Herald at the time. Most of these, he said, are English-language learners whose parents moved and whose phones were disconnected.

Nelson said she has worked with a community center and neighborhood afterschool program known as to support families and, in some cases, find students who couldn’t otherwise be located.

She credited the center’s longtime director, Sylvia Jordan, with tracking down many neighborhood kids. “If you can’t find them, Miss Sylvia can,” Nelson recalled telling district officials. “Some of our kids were going after school — they just weren’t going to school.”

In the district, the new achievement findings have been greeted with a mixed reception.

Board member Rojas called the data “alarming,” but Carvalho said he and his staff are approaching them with “trepidation” and “doubt,” since students learning from home may have had parental help on the tests — those in school, he said, may not have had the same assistance.

“It is data that we’re not going to take to the bank as we have in the past,” he told board members.

But Curriculum Associates’ Huff said she doesn’t suspect “widespread cheating” from students who took iReady tests at home. Even if students got help from family members, she said, she doubts there was intention to cheat.

“I think it was very innocent helping, because adults, older siblings, or others in the home did not realize that these young students — first, second, third graders — that they were taking a test that needed to happen independently. And if they had known that, they likely would not have helped — just like a parent would never help their child try to pass an eye test.”

So-called “Covid learning loss” has obsessed educators and researchers for the better part of a year, but Huff said the term doesn’t accurately describe what’s happening to students. She prefers the term “.”

“I do think it’s more accurate because a lot of what has happened is just less instructional time,” she said. “Students have not had the opportunity to learn. They didn’t have learning to lose. They were just not finished doing the learning that we would expect, given the circumstances of the past year.”