(NewsNation) — U.S. students made historically large academic gains in subjects like math and reading in the last school year, but researchers have discovered kids remain woefully behind where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, creating learning gaps that mostly fall along socioeconomic lines.
Students between the third and eighth grades essentially lost one-half of a grade level in math and one-third of a grade level in reading between 2019 and 2022, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard.
States like Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi have made up ground over the past year in high-poverty areas. In areas like Massachusetts and Connecticut, however, the recovery was much higher in wealthier districts, and less affluent parts of the state were left behind.
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the recovery has been uneven, and we have a long way to go,” said Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.
Schools gaining some ground in math, reading
Nationwide, all but four states were still behind pre-pandemic levels of achievement in math or reading, according to the scorecard. So far, students have made up about a third of what they lost in math during the pandemic year and 25% in reading.
Despite the progress, researchers found students are more than one-third of a grade behind in math in 17 states and reading in 14 states.
According to the study, those gaps hit harder in districts where financial and socioeconomic disparities created learning gaps that existed long before the pandemic. The study found that students in high-poverty districts lost more ground academically than students in more affluent districts.
“The gaps that were already there in 2019 widened during the pandemic,” Thomas Kane, faculty director at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, said. “The most important message from (the study) is that widened gaps have not closed.”
In-person learning’s effect on student engagement
Alabama was the only state that topped its 2019 testing performance in math, the study showed, while only students in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi exceeded pre-pandemic levels in reading.
Eric Mackey, the Alabama state superintendent of education, attributes that success to the fact that 80% of the state’s schools never closed during the pandemic.
For the first few months of the pandemic, Mackey said about 50% of the state’s students learned in person.
While larger-city districts like Birmingham did close for a period of time to address health concerns, Mackey said keeping students engaged with the learning process was key.
“There’s nothing that can replace an in-person teacher,” Mackey told NewsNation. “Even though at the time we were obviously dealing with a worldwide pandemic and we had to take care of health issues first as quickly as possible, we wanted to get students back in the classroom, and we were able to get that done.”
While students from disadvantaged and impoverished neighborhoods have routinely struggled academically, students in communities like Birmingham, Alabama, picked up and gained more ground in math since the pandemic than pupils in more middle-class neighborhoods, Mackey said.
Birmingham City Superintendent Mark Sullivan pushed for year-round schooling to help close learning gaps, the New York Times reported. But when parents pushed back against the idea, Sullivan introduced the idea of offering extra learning sessions during fall, winter and spring breaks.
The summer school-like learning environment also provided child care for families at times when parents would need to worry about having their children looked after. Mackey now uses the initiative as a model for other poorer districts across the state where students may be struggling to keep up.
Mackey said that exposure to COVID-19 still limits learning time for both students and teachers. To combat those losses, state education leaders emphasized high-dosage tutoring along with after-school and summer school programs.
The form of tutoring, which provides intensified 1-on-1 instruction at least three times a week, is reportedly 20 times as effective for math and 15 times as effective as traditional tutoring, according to studies highlighted by the National Education Association.
“It’s been a challenging time for students,” Mackey said. “In many of them, it’s just been the academic challenge. But in some of them, of course, it’s been more of an emotional challenge … and that made it more challenging academically for students.”
An inquiry-based focus
While students in the state of Michigan struggled to meet pre-pandemic testing levels, the community school district in Novi — 30 miles northwest of Detroit — never saw a dip in testing, according to Superintendent Ben Mainka.
He said that the suburban district had to “flip their delivery model on a dime.”
As students in the upper-middle class district were forced into remote learning environments, the district committed to keeping its educational model as normal as possible. Although other districts focused strongly on math and reading, Novi added at-home science lessons to its COVID learning strategy to keep students engaged as if they never left the classroom.
The focus on inquiry-based, remote learning opportunities kept the district’s educational approach well-rounded, which has led to students now remaining at or above where they were testing in 2019, Mainka said.
Yet, that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done among students still coping with social and emotional anxiety after becoming accustomed to school-related screen time, which takes a toll on academic achievement.
“I think it’s understandable if you take those (normal) experiences away in a system at scale, it’s going to take a while for people to recover from that,” Mainka told NewsNation.
Where students missed the mark
Of the states that have yet to get back to 2019 levels, Oregon has struggled more than normal.
On average, elementary and middle school students in the Beaver State remain two to three times farther behind in reading and science, researchers discovered.
Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand For Children, said that while other states devoted federal funding designed to help students rebound from pandemic struggles for educational matters, Oregon officials spent money on infrastructure, staffing and health and safety measures, National Public Radio reported.
Although some districts in Oregon did show educational gains, the majority did not, which Pope finds concerning.
“Oregon has a long history of not wanting to tell school districts what to do,” Pope told NPR. “I think that really hurt us in the COVID response.”
Officials from the Oregon Department of Education told The Oregonian that they are hoping to invest $90 million in early childhood literacy programs to overhaul how the state’s youngest learners are taught to read.
But for now, Charlene Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Education, said state officials are not happy with the state’s educational performance. The agency did not respond to specific questions asked by NewsNation in a recent email about students’ lagging performance.
“While we know the data does not tell a good story, we also know what it takes in order to start getting students what they need,” Williams told NPR.