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.”

There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word. 

The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts. 

The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia. 

The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8^th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8^thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points. 

To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track. 

The table below shows the state-level results in 8^th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards. 

You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the , 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests. 

Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8^th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. 

To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success. 

A philanthropic initiative launched in 2022 to get students back on track from COVID learning loss is returning promising results, a new study suggests: just four weeks spent in the program last year helped students regain nearly one-fourth of their reading skills and one-third of math skills, compared to students who didn’t participate in the program.

The initiative, underwritten by and other funders, serves charter school students about to enter grades 1 through 9.  

Researchers at Arizona State University examined over 35,000 Summer Boost students in eight cities, finding that in just 22 days of programming, on average, students saw about three to four weeks of reading progress and about four to five weeks in math. In reading, that works out to making up about 22% of COVID learning losses; in math, it’s about 31%.

While students across all demographic groups got a boost, English Language Learners saw the strongest growth, achieving about seven to eight weeks worth of learning in just over four weeks. Researchers said students moving into grades 4-8 saw particularly accelerated growth.  

Students took part in the study in Baltimore, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, New York City, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. 

Schools participating in Summer Boost are free to use either a provided curriculum or a high-quality one of their choice, but researchers found that about a third of schools used a “balanced kind of curricular approach” that reserved time for both academics and engaging enrichment activities, said ASU’s Geoffrey Borman, who led the research.

Schools that struck that balance, he said, had “the most positive impacts for kids.” 

In summer school more broadly, Borman noted, the biggest challenges are getting kids to show up and stay engaged across the summer — and attracting high-quality teachers at a time when “both teachers and kids would probably rather be on summer break.”

To that end, schools in the program are encouraged to use as much of their budget as possible to pay teachers, said Sunny Larson, K-12 Education Program Lead at Bloomberg. The incentive, she added, “really got those veteran educators back into the classroom.”

Many prioritized hiring teachers who had already worked with these students during the school year. That allowed a continuity “that I also think was beneficial,” said Borman. 

Previous research suggests that pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most students, with many needing the equivalent of about four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Ninth-graders need a full year of extra school to catch up, according to 2023 findings from the assessment provider NWEA.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the findings were promising, but that he’d like to know whether the effects persist throughout the school year.

“While I think many have the perception that summer school is rarely effective, these results show that well designed summer programs can indeed be a helpful tool to help catch children up or accelerate their growth,” he said. The results suggest the impact of Summer Boost is “very promising — on par with regular school-year learning rates.”

‘Effective guardrails’ in place

The program includes at least 90 minutes each of English Language Arts and math instruction daily with a 25:1 student-teacher ratio. Summer programs must maintain an average daily attendance rate of 70% to get full funding — “effective guardrails” that ensure high quality, Borman said.

While they have flexibility in how they recruit, they’re encouraged to seek out students who can most benefit. 

Summer Boost originated in 2022, when Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, likened stalled academic progress from the pandemic to “the educational equivalent of long COVID.”

“Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally,” said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser to the research. “With so many students far behind, I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options.”

Kane noted that to expand the school year beyond 180 days incentivizes districts “to replace what students lost during the pandemic, which was instructional time.” 

Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, whose helped gauge the program’s effectiveness, said she was glad to see its positive impact. 

“There is real urgency to use summer programs to provide specific, personalized support for struggling students so that they can return to school ready for grade-level work,” she said. “Assessing students relative to grade level standards is the most accurate way to understand where they are and what support they need.”

Huff noted that Curriculum Associates will soon release research showing student academic growth “still has a way to go” to recover to pre-pandemic levels, especially for the youngest students. “The Summer Boost program results underscore this, and show that when given the right supports, students can accelerate their learning.”

In the new ASU study, researchers noted a few caveats. For instance, they admitted that the findings are based on only one year of data and can’t provide evidence of impact over time. It’s possible, they said, that the findings may change as more years of data are added and the sample size increases. 

They also noted that many student records in the sample were incomplete, missing either math or reading pre- or post-test scores.   

Also missing: key student demographic data, meaning that researchers couldn’t analyze all of the students’ scores in relation to indicators such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. And the data don’t include how students ended up in the program, limiting researchers’ ability to compare it to other types of summer learning programs that may have different enrollment requirements. 

But Borman noted that research on such large groups rarely yields such strong results, “And the fact that these outcomes are seen pretty consistently across thousands of kids and multiple cities, I think that lends even more power to these results.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Michael Bloomberg’s party affiliation when he ran for president in 2020.

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.