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.”

Thousands of miles from home, the group of new New Yorkers walks a few hundred steps.

Attached to a trilingual church and food bank, the campus of VOICE, a K-8 charter school, has become a refuge for newcomer families seeking asylum and new lives from mostly Spanish-speaking countries including Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, as well as Pakistan and Egypt, among others.

“Many of them are living in temporary housing and struggling to find work. The families are under a lot of pressure … It’s just a huge amount of change,” said VOICE social worker Kim Moglia.

Through the Long Island City school’s proximity to temporary housing and a growing reputation among families, the school is serving 267 migrant students this year, the most of any charter school in New York state, according to federal Title III funding. 

Today, the population comprises nearly a third of VOICE’s student body, and staff are urgently finding ways to support the students and their families living in eight neighborhood shelters and others in Manhattan and parts of Queens.

But legal experts and child advocates warn a new city policy after 60 days will jeopardize the types of connections being built at schools like VOICE, the most stable place in their lives right now.

“The idea that in the middle of the school year, they would be transitioning housing and then having to start all over again — it worries us,” principal Franklin Headley said. 

“They would have to make new friends, new relationships with the teachers … We have the momentum, even in these first two months, to continue with the children that have come to us,” he added. 

Throughout New York City, an estimated 21,000 migrant students have joined the public school system since last summer, according to the Department of Education. In the latest waves, nearly all children have been younger, in K-3 grades or not yet school aged, educators and social service staffers told ����Ӱ��.

While there is room — DOE school enrollment declined by more than 120,000 students in the last five years — the newcomers are experiencing some of the highest levels of need. 

Even with the housing concern mounting, VOICE staff has continued to look for ways to work with the new students. To learn from schools serving similar populations, staff traveled cross-country to San Diego over the summer, and are now finishing installation of large washer-dryers for families to use to encourage attendance and remove the financial burden.

School-wide, required music classes help with language acquisition. Newcomers who are struggling are paired with a buddy who speaks their native language. In hallways, it’s not uncommon to hear whispered Urdu and Portuguese. Teachers regularly use keywords, explanations and translated materials in Spanish. 

Staff have also taken to small innovations — altering seating charts so newcomers build friendships and teachers can spot if anyone is struggling; bringing in a led by retired players; using the app Language Line to translate messages to families about progress; hiring an art therapist full time.

At VOICE, some students are getting their first introduction to the classroom. 

“You hear with your eyes” 

Noticing that many are starting without prior schooling or written literacy in their native languages, ELL teacher Jasmine Calderon leads small groups to build on foundations.

Here, a group of 10 first graders practice saying and writing the letter “p,” as they work through the alphabet to begin phonics, how letters interact with each other to make sound.  

Because many newcomers aren’t yet used to school life, she gently reminds them to tune in, singing their names and instructing them to pat their heads as they watch and listen for the sound of “puh” in her sentences. 

“We’re moving our bodies in a certain way, there’s visuals there for you … You’re going to start to connect what you hear with what you see,” Calderon said, explaining how she helps students see the importance of watching her closely, especially if they don’t understand the words.

 “I tell them all the time, ‘you hear with your eyes.’” 

Building blocks for new language

Across the hall, in a second-grade classroom, a row of books greets students as they walk in, including Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin, about two boys growing up in the U.S. and Mexico.

Settling into desks for a career planning activity, students dream of being rock stars and astronauts. When language feels out of reach, they draw.

Posters and tools to support reading and writing acquisition deck the walls: sentence starters, strategies that can help make sense of vowel sounds.  

In third grade, students break down plots into beginning, middle and end in graphic organizers, a tool teachers have utilized more frequently to help build fluency.

“Even if they’re not at the point where they’re reading the words,” Calderon said, “at least they’re engaged in some type of work. We found that having them draw something was more engaging than just giving them the book and taking observational notes.” 

The power of music 

The new population has pushed VOICE, founded in 2008, to emphasize music, singing and social-emotional learning, to find a renewed purpose in its mission. 

In required music classes, which supports language acquisition, students shed the nerves that can accompany things like reading aloud.

“You don’t have to be thinking about producing language, you’re just singing along, and then work on pronunciation and things like that there. You’re not taking the same kind of risk as constructing a sentence,” Headley said. 

In a room brimming with guitars and laughter, students sing a good morning song featuring at least six languages. Alongside a refrain from their teacher’s guitar, they collectively sing out a common greeting:
“Valentina, Valentina, Valentina, how are you?” 

In a rhyming solo, Valentina responds: “I’m tired, I’m happy, and I hope that you are, too.” 

Soccer: A language of its own 

From choir to soccer practice, the school’s newcomer students are building social connections that transcend language barriers and help their ability to show up in the classroom.

For Jah, a seventh grader who speaks seven languages originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa, playing soccer brings him back to some of his favorite memories. VOICE helped him with the largest barrier: buying turf shoes.

Migrant student athletes perform better in-season than out, according to Matt Coleman, middle school and athletic director. Eighth-grade leaders help translate plays for their teammates. The 15-minute walk back from the park is never silent. 

“They’re talking and that’s what I’m trying to get them to do, just communicate with each other,” he said. “If it’s in Spanish or English, it doesn’t really matter.”

To support alum that go on to play soccer in high school, athletic staff juggle calendars to make good on a promise to attend one of each of their games. 

The soccer program, open to students of any gender, and its connection to local parks and people is one way students find “opportunity within the community, which can get overlooked,” in brainstorming ways to support migrant students, said soccer coach Dominic Van Bussell.

Keeping culture in the room 

To Genesis Bolanos, who teaches at least 10 newcomers across two periods of seventh-grade math, using students’ home languages in the classroom is what makes all the difference, especially for kids who are sometimes only weeks into living in a new country. 

In her classes, students work with translated materials provided by the school, allowing them to focus on math without being penalized for their budding English literacy. 

Bolanos said the approach is too-often resisted. Her last Queens charter school wouldn’t allow students and staff to speak Spanish, which contributes to a “loss of shared culture.” 

Because VOICE encouraged teachers to try out ideas to support the newcomer population, like hosting a Hall of Nations to get to know foods and traditions from students’ home countries, Bolanos switched up the seating arrangements to lessen isolation. 

“In seating them together, they build their own friendships and have their own communities apart from adults, which is obviously what we want,” said Bolanos, a first-generation Ecuadorian-American.

Some newcomers, just a few weeks in, have started to ask to follow along with English materials, keeping their Spanish sheets as a reference point as they learn integers and foundational arithmetic. 

“This is just what newcomers deserve,” Bolanos said. 

“Something we couldn’t predict” 

Some newly enrolled VOICE charter families, after beginning a relationship with the school over the summer, were moved without warning cross-city to shelters in Jamaica, Queens just days before classes started, forced to find other schools.

“That’s something we couldn’t predict, that the city made a decision to start moving people,” principal Headley said. “… I didn’t understand why families would [be ordered to] leave this housing, which is close to the subway and close to facilities.” 

The practice of moving families with little notice has continued into the school year, according to . 

Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has limited migrant family stays in Manhattan hotel shelters run by Humanitarian Resource and Relief centers, home to about 15,000 students, to 60 days. The majority of families, staying in shelters run by the city’s Department of Homelessness Services, .

City officials did not return requests for comment.

, threatening to uproot them from their one place of stability.

That stability was so important to one VOICE family with four children, that they commuted to the school two hours each way after being moved to a Coney Island shelter, the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. 

“Those kids, including a kindergartner, wouldn’t give up,” Headley said tearfully. He and other staff ultimately traveled to Coney Island to help the family find a nearby school. 

The city’s 60-day policy stance, he added, will require schools to take on that kind of “placement work” after moves.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s the reality,” Headley said. “… We have to make sure that they’re OK — that they’re going to be some place where they feel comfortable and safe.”

All photos by Marianna McMurdock