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.”

But bowing to uncertainty sparked by the pandemic, officials will allow one-year changes to the criteria states use to identify those schools. That means the report cards states use to communicate student performance to the public could look quite different.

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To help measure COVID-19’s impact, states might also choose to rate schools on how much instructional time students lost or break out chronic absenteeism by whether students were attending school in person or remotely. The department will collect comments on the 31-page document until Jan. 17.

“This gives a clear signal to the field and to the states that we are restarting accountability,” said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign. “This data needs to be reported to families and the community.”

The nonprofit is among the organizations that have been calling for more statewide data on student performance during the pandemic — even though standardized tests were canceled in 2019-20 and several states saw low turnout for testing last school year. Others say the department, by allowing such a vast array of changes, could leave parents and the public more in the dark about how well schools have performed.

The department is recommending that states and districts update improvement plans to focus on the pandemic’s effects on the most vulnerable students. States can also give those schools more time to improve by not counting the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, and can change the achievement targets they need to hit to be removed from the state’s lowest-performing list.

“Uncle Sam is saying that not only is it okay to move the goalposts, states can install new goalposts if they want to, too,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute who helped implement Indiana’s accountability system.

In addition to the temporary changes, the document encourages states to consider long-term additions, such as adding new indicators of student success that could endure beyond 2022.

‘Behind-the-scenes tinkering’

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, states must test students in reading, math and science and publicly identify their lowest-performing Title I schools and those where groups of students, such as English learners or students with disabilities, consistently underperform. Those schools, which receive extra funds to help students make progress, have up to four years to show improvement or face additional state intervention.

Maria Cammack, deputy superintendent of assessment, accountability, data systems and research at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said state officials aren’t talking about adding new measures of school quality for one year, but want to be as transparent as possible about data elements that can supplement its high-stakes accountability system.

“Everybody wants to understand unfinished learning,” she said, adding that it can take a while for districts to report and interpret new information. “Any changes enacted for a single year breaks our ability to monitor change in performance in a time where we need to understand it most deeply.”

Bibb Hubbard, president of the nonprofit Learning Heroes, said she appreciated the department’s expectation that states include families in making decisions about changes to accountability. Parents, she said, rely on state report cards to understand their children’s progress in school and “want the truth, even if it isn’t good news.” States, she added, should research which measures parents find most meaningful.

Chu added that it could be hard for the public to keep up with “all of the behind-the-scenes tinkering.”

“If states add, modify [or] remove a bunch of indicators from their state report cards,” he said, “it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get an honest accounting of how schools and students have fared.”

A key question for state leaders has been how to calculate whether schools have improved over the past few years in the absence of consecutive years of assessment data. Most states consider test score trends over multiple years as part of their accountability systems.

The guidance suggests states could replace the growth measure with a different indicator — like achievement gaps — but experts say such a change could significantly alter which schools are identified for improvement.

Growth is currently “by far the best” measure for differentiating between schools, said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri–Columbia and an expert on growth measures. “I can’t even name what a plausible back-up plan would be,” he said.

Chris Janzer, the assistant director of accountability at the Michigan Department of Education, added that there’s no guarantee state testing will run smoothly this year.

“We don’t know what test participation is going to look like this coming spring, especially with Omicron raging now,” he said. “Will we have another wave in the spring that causes more school disruptions?”

For 2021 testing, the department waived the requirement that states assess 95 percent of their students. But if schools fall short of that percentage in 2022, it’s possible they would be identified as low-performing based on participation rates alone, said Janzer, whose state saw 70 percent participation last year.

Oklahoma had an overall participation rate of over 90 percent last spring, Cammack said, but in some districts, only about 30 percent of students took state tests, despite an assessment window that was three weeks longer than normal and included extended hours and Saturday sessions.

‘Meet the moment’

Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, who serves as president of the California State Board of Education, acknowledged that 2022 probably won’t be a “neat and tidy year” in the realm of testing and accountability.

But she is among those who see the guidance as a way to “lay a path toward reauthorization” of ESSA. The department, she said, is sending the message that accountability is important, but that states should also “meet the moment” and consider changes that allow more room for other measures of student achievement and school performance.

Bell-Ellwanger, with the Data Quality Campaign, said the guidance presents an opportunity to add criteria that some say is lacking from many state report cards — such as more data on what students do after high school.

In December, her organization and Chiefs for Change, a network of district leaders, issued a report arguing that K-12 leaders could better prepare students for college and the workplace if data on college enrollment, jobs and other postsecondary trends were more accessible.

“As states signal that they are moving forward with recovery,” she said, “understanding college and career pathways and the economic mobility of students is important.”

The department’s guidance notes that states could also consider adding “opportunity to learn” standards — such as the extent to which students have access to qualified educators and a high-quality curriculum. A recent report from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, highlighted growing efforts to rate schools on questions of equity, which could range from whether students have access to advanced courses or even if schools have Black and Hispanic mental health providers on staff.

But the report noted that some measures might not be statistically valid and reliable enough for an accountability system that determines consequences for schools.

“They need to be predictive,” said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd and co-author of the report. “They need to confidently signal how students are likely to perform in school and beyond.”

But he added that just reporting data on some of those goals is still useful for the public even if they aren’t used to identify schools for accountability. The department’s guidance takes this “cautious stance,” he said. “Transparency has the power to focus educators’ and others’ efforts, even when they don’t face direct consequences for the information that’s collected.”

A new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking, which the state legislature still needs to approve, would involve three “progress monitoring” tests spread throughout the school year. DeSantis called the plan the “final step to eradicate Common Core from our assessments.”

Last year, the state dropped Common Core standards, which many Republicans associate with the Obama administration, and is phasing in . To comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and receive federal funds, however, the state would still have to test all students in reading and math, produce end-of-year results and share the data with parents.

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The “announcement feels like somebody trying to make a point with teachers and parents, but the devil is in the details,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit that focuses on making education data clear to parents.

The governor’s announcement comes amid growing anti-testing sentiment and complaints from educators that testing takes too long, often offering unhelpful results after students have moved on to the next gradel. With state tests cancelled in 2020 because of the pandemic, teachers have also been relying more on programs such as NWEA’s MAP assessments to gauge how the pandemic has impacted students’ progress. Federal law doesn’t require states to test in the spring, and under an existing , some states, such as Georgia, are already trying interim tests throughout the year to minimize emphasis on end-of-year exams.

But experts say there are downsides.

“If they take the current test and cut it into three pieces, spreading it out over the year, it’s perhaps not that big a deal,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “But if schools didn’t like the ‘high-stakes’ nature of annual testing, they’ll be in for a rude awakening when the pressure’s on three times a year.”

Kowalski added that districts might not want to give up “benchmark” tests, such as MAP, Renaissance Learning’s Star or Curriculum Associates’s i-Ready, because teachers find them useful. If the new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking — or FAST tests — are layered on top of those, schools could find themselves giving more tests throughout the year instead of less.

Another possibility is that districts might stop paying for MAP or a similar test, leaving teachers with fewer data points to know if their “kids are on track,” Kowalski said.

Testing all students once a year in two core subjects sounds like a simple charge, she added.

‘But we haven’t been able to nail it,” she said. “How are we going to approach an innovative assessment system that you need a chart to explain?”

Patricia Levesque, executive director of Foundation for Florida’s Future — part of the Foundation for Excellence in Education launched by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — raised about the plan. One is whether teachers would be required to teach on Tallahassee’s timetable in order to be prepared for the three statewide tests and another is whether the spring test would simply replace the end-of-year test, giving teachers “less time to cover the full year of content.”

The testing program DeSantis is ending was a centerpiece of Bush’s two terms as governor.

DeSantis’s proposal applies to standardized tests for English language arts and math, but doesn’t eliminate high school end-of-course tests in algebra, U.S. history and biology.

Teachers unions , and Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho — even though he’s been at odds with DeSantis over his ban on universal masking in schools — the move.

Chu noted that even though the U.S. Department of Education required states to give tests this year, officials have allowed considerable flexibility with COVID-19 continuing to disrupt learning. Some states were allowed to delay spring assessments until this fall, the District of Columbia hasn’t conducted state tests for two years, and California allowed districts to choose which tests to administer.

“In today’s environment,” he said, “it’s hard to see the feds pushing back that hard.”