‘Not news anybody wanted to hear’: Students Worse Off Than Last Year in Reading, Math; U.S. Students Trailing Pre-Pandemic Learning Levels, New Study Shows, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jul 13, 2023

‘Not news anybody wanted to hear’: Students worse off than last year in reading, math:

An analysis of national test score data Tuesday further confirms a dismal reality facing schools: Academically, kids aren’t where they would’ve been before the pandemic, and they aren’t progressing at the pace needed to catch up.

According to the analysis, in fact, students this past school year made fewer academic gains than they did the year before – when classrooms were still dealing with frequent quarantines and learning disruptions.

“We have interrupted the progress that we were making until the fall of this (school) year,” said Karyn Lewis, co-author of the analysis and a director at NWEA, a K-12 research organization that develops assessments. “Not only have we not made progress toward recovery, we’re actually a bit worse off than we were at the start of the year.

“This isn’t news anybody wanted to hear.”

Key takeaways

The analysis focuses on roughly 6.7 million students in grades three through eight who took NWEA math and reading tests in the years since COVID-19 hit, comparing them with their predecessors in the several years before the pandemic. —>READ MORE HERE

U.S. students trailing pre-pandemic learning levels, new study shows:

U.S. students have not caught back up to pre-COVID levels of learning in math and reading, with Black and Hispanic pupils among the hardest hit by the pandemic, a study released on Tuesday showed.

The analysis by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) highlights the continuing toll on education from the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to prolonged school closures and remote learning for millions of school children.

Nearly $200 billion in federal money has been allocated to address pandemic-related learning loss. Schools have used the funds to bolster tutoring programs and summer school options, in addition to other recovery efforts.

But an evaluation of test scores from 6.7 million public school students in third through eighth grades showed they had not made the same progress during the 2022-2023 school year as their pre-pandemic counterparts, according to NWEA, a national education research organization.

“Even though this is disheartening, we can’t look away and we can’t just accept that this is our new reality,” Karyn Lewis, a co-author of the study, said.