US Students Continue to Struggle with Reading Amidst Pandemic's Impact
Recent test results reveal that students from third to eighth grade across the country are still grappling with a reading slump that has its roots in the pandemic. The situation seems a bit brighter for mathematics, with some level of stability or minor improvement in student performance, albeit still lagging behind the scores from students of the same grades in 2019.
The data is sourced from a well-known educational testing and research organization that conducts the Spring MAP Growth assessment, a series of tests that millions of students from numerous schools across the country take.
Math Shows Modest Improvement, Reading Remains Unchanged
"Mathematics appears to be making a slow comeback, albeit a modest one, but there's no movement in reading," says an expert from the testing organization. "Everyone wishes to move past this phase, but the data clearly shows that we're far from it. Ignoring the issue won't make it vanish; it only means we're accepting these results as the new normal, which is unacceptable."
Furthermore, the organization is introducing a new tool accessible to the public: a performance dashboard designed to aid school officials and policymakers in understanding how their students are doing compared to a broad, representative sample of students nationwide.
Reading Scores: No Signs of Improvement
There's hardly any positive news in the spring reading scores. They indicate that minor improvements made across grade levels in 2022 have disappeared, with students mostly performing at or even below the low achievement levels seen during the pandemic.
In essence, students from third to eighth grades are performing worse than their counterparts in 2019. This lack of progress is apparent regardless of students' racial/ethnic background or the poverty level of their school, as per the testing organization's statement.
Math Scores: A Glimmer of Hope
The math achievement data from spring is slightly more optimistic.
Students from various grades have made minor improvements compared to their peers in 2024. Also, most grades have exhibited slow yet consistent progress since 2021.
One more encouraging aspect: this improvement in math performance is observed across different student groups, regardless of their racial/ethnic background or socio-economic status.
Regrettably, as of spring, none of the grades were performing in math at the levels witnessed in 2019, before the pandemic.
These findings reflect similar alarming patterns previously highlighted by federal data released earlier in the year as part of the Nation's Report Card.
A New Performance Dashboard for Schools and Policymakers
The testing organization has also launched a new dashboard that is publicly accessible. This tool enables schools and policymakers to measure how their local students are performing compared to students in other parts of the country.
This dashboard will be updated with fresh data three times a year, which is significantly more frequent than comparable data from the Nation's Report Card, which is released every two years.
An education policy expert likens these rounds of student achievement data to beneficial health checks to monitor students' progress.
"Waiting for two years is too long for American students, especially when they are recovering from a significant setback, such as the one caused by the pandemic," he says, praising the new dashboard as "an essential supplement to the Nation's Report Card for tracking students' recovery."
An official at the testing organization comments, "Considering the uneven pace of recovery, even within schools and classrooms, national trends like these are a critical first step in understanding where to look more closely at the local level and ask important questions about the needed support and resources."