The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen
Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial.
That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ performance in reading and math began to dip far below pre-pandemic norms, worrying educators and families around the country.
Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.
The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of test score data cited in the report.
Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding essentially no rebound since students returned to the classroom.
The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some sound the alarm publicly about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video.
“Focus and endurance for any sort of task, especially reading, has been really hard for a lot of teenagers” since coming back from pandemic closures, Sarah Mulhern Gross, who teaches honors English at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, told Vox.
Meanwhile, even the youngest children, who were not yet in school when lockdowns began, are showing troubling signs of academic and behavioral delays. “We are talking 4- and 5-year-olds who are throwing chairs, biting, hitting,” Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, told the New York Times earlier this year.
If schools and districts can’t reverse these trends, Covid could leave “an indelible mark” on a generation of kids, CRPE director Robin Lake said this week. The effects are greatest for low-income students, students with disabilities, and children learning English as a second language, who faced educational inequities prior to the pandemic that have only worsened today. Covid “shined a light on the resource inequities and opportunity gaps that existed in this country, and then it exacerbated them,” said Allison Socol, vice president for P-12 policy, research, and practice at EdTrust, a nonprofit devoted to educational equity.
The report is the latest effort to catalog what many educators, parents, and kids see as the deep scars — academic, but also social and emotional — left behind by the pandemic.
Earlier this year, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nationwide testing company, reported that rather than making up ground since the pandemic, students were falling further behind. In 2023-24, the gap between pre- and post-Covid test score averages widened by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math, according to the NWEA report.
When it comes to education, the effect of the pandemic “is not over,” Lake said. “It’s not a thing of the past.”
Kids are behind in reading and math, and they’re not catching up
Nearly all public schools in America closed by the end of March 2020, and while some reopened that fall, others did not fully resume in-person learning until fall 2021.
American kids have fallen far behind in math and reading | Vox