Question 1

1. The losses were deep

Accepted Answer

The pandemic’s impact on test scores has been well documented, with extended school closures combining with other stresses of the coronavirus to cause learning losses. Some of the best data come from the Education Recovery Scorecard project by Harvard and Stanford, because it synthesizes test scores from 30 states to create national averages and compare scores across states. By the time all schools returned to in-person learning in the spring of 2022, the average student in grades three through eight had lost the equivalent of a half-grade level in math and a third of a grade level in reading, with scores falling in 2020, 2021 and again in 2022.

Question 2

2. But the recovery is underway

Accepted Answer

The new data, from the spring of 2023, show improvements for the first time since pandemic shutdowns. Teachers were challenged to help students not just return to normal learning patterns, but to gain more knowledge than they would in a typical year to make up for three years of losses. Given challenges of a mental health crisis, chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages and more, it was no simple task. But on average, students did gain more than a typical pre-covid year, the report found: Between the spring of 2022 and the spring of 2023, students recovered about one-third of the three-year loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading.

Question 3

3. The gains are uneven, and the gap between rich and poor is growing

Accepted Answer

Overall, average test scores improved for both poor and nonpoor students in the 15 states for which researchers had economic data. But the improvements were larger for students who were not from poor families (a group that includes families who are low-income but not poor as well as those who are wealthy). As a result, the gap in achievement based on income grew. Last year, the same team of researchers reported that pandemic learning losses within districts were not much different for poor vs. nonpoor students. If a district was recording low average scores, children of all income levels within that district all were scoring poorly. They concluded that this was due to factors affecting the entire community, such as how long schools were closed, access to broadband internet and covid mortality rates. During the recovery last year, that was no longer true, with students from nonpoor homes gaining ground twice as fast as those from poor homes in the same district. “We do not know the reason for this, but it is troubling,” the report concluded. “Even as student achievement has improved rapidly since 2022, those gains have not been equally shared, even within the same school district.”

Question 4

4. Racial gaps also grew larger

Accepted Answer

White students, on average, have long recorded higher scores on standardized tests than students of color. During the pandemic, test scores of Black and Hispanic students fell more than those of White students, widening existing gaps. During the first year of the recovery, Black students’ scores rose more than White students, but those gains were not enough to make up for the widening gaps during the previous three years. As a result, the gulf between White and Black test scores was a bit larger in 2023 than it had been in 2019. The gap between White and Hispanic scores also grew.

Question 5

5. Differences across states were significant

Accepted Answer

Alabama is the only state where average math scores in 2023 exceeded pre-pandemic levels. In reading, three states surpassed their 2019 levels: Louisiana, Illinois and Mississippi. Some of the biggest net losses since 2019 in both math and reading were recorded in Oregon and Virginia and, in reading, in Nevada. Students in 10 states lost ground in reading: Nevada, Virginia, Oregon, California, South Dakota, Wyoming, Indiana, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington. All but one state — Oregon — improved at least a little bit in math last year. And states including Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Mississippi improved by more than a third of a grade level in one year. That means those students learned 133 percent or more of what is typically learned in a given year. “Any improvement of such a magnitude was a remarkable achievement,” the report says.

Recovery in math, reading scores is underway — but slowly