Test scores show students struggling to overcome pandemic-era lows: NPR

When it comes to reading, the nation’s third through eighth graders are still mired in the pandemic doldrums, according to new testing data. In mathematics, the news is only slightly more encouraging: student results in these years have either remained stable or slightly improved, although all years remain below the performance levels of students in the same year in 2019.

The data comes from NWEA, a K-12 testing and research organization, and its Spring 2025 MAP Growth assessment, a suite of tests taken by millions of students in thousands of U.S. schools.

“Math is moving backwards, even modestly, but reading is not moving,” says Karyn Lewis, vice president of research at NWEA. “I know people want this chapter to be over, but this data reminds us that it’s not. Looking the other way won’t make the problem go away; it means accepting that these results are permanent. That’s not an option.”

NWEA is also unveiling a new tool that will be publicly available: a performance dashboard intended to help school leaders and policymakers understand how their students are performing compared to a broad, representative sample of the country.

Reading scores remain stuck

There is little good news in the spring 2025 reading scores. They show that the slight gains made across all grade levels in 2022 have been erased, with students across all grade levels mostly performing at or below the pandemic-era lows.

In short, students in grades three through eight continue to perform worse than students in the same grades in 2019. This “stagnation is consistent regardless of race/ethnicity or level of school poverty,” the NWEA said in a press release.

Mathematics results rebound slightly

There’s a little more room for optimism in the spring 2025 math achievement data.

Students in several grades made slight progress compared to the same age groups in 2024. Most grades have also shown slow but steady improvement since 2021.

Another positive: This improvement in math scores affected groups of students regardless of their race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status.

Unfortunately, in the spring of 2025, no math grades reached the levels seen in 2019, before the pandemic.

The NWEA’s findings reflect equally disturbing trends highlighted by federal data released earlier this year as part of what’s known as the National Report Card.

A new performance dashboard

NWEA also released a new public dashboard for schools and politicians to assess how their local students are performing compared to the rest of the country.

The dashboard will be updated with new data three times a year – far more often than comparable data from the Nation’s Report Card, which only comes out every two years.

Tom Kane of Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research compares these sets of student achievement data to useful health checks to see how students are doing.

“Two years is too long for U.S. college students to go between doctor visits, especially when recovering from a serious injury, such as occurred during the pandemic,” Kane says, calling the data available through this new dashboard “an essential complement (to the Nation’s Report Card) for tracking student recovery.”

Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA, says: “Given the unevenness of recovery, even within schools and classrooms, national trends like these are an important first step in understanding where to dig deeper at the local level and ask critical questions about needed support and resources.

The move to provide districts and states with more data to help inform their decision-making — including on whether and how to spend scarce funds allocated to schools for academic interventions — comes as the Trump administration gutted the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the division of the U.S. Department of Education that collects, analyzes and publishes federal student achievement data.