Pandemic learning recovery? Yes, and no.

Longtime teacher Manny Aceves says students this past school year were like athletes attempting to complete a marathon after not running for two years. Children were winded at the outset after extensive remote learning, yet slowly their endurance for classroom work increased. 

“We’re talking about sixth grade and there’s a lot of rigorous curriculum, but they were pooped out by lunch,” says Mr. Aceves, who retired in June after 31 years teaching third and sixth grade in La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in Southern California. “Part of it was building stamina, their ability to pay attention and to focus.”

But gradually, over the course of the 2021-2022 school year, Mr. Aceves’ students progressed. His district purchased the software i-Ready, which identifies student reading and math levels. Some of his sixth graders were shocked when their results placed them at a second, third, or even kindergarten reading level. But by the time the year ended, a few kids were reading on grade level, and everyone had made progress, according to their teacher. 

“Some kids made tremendous growth. I personally believe it was because we were in person,” says Mr. Aceves. “If they know a teacher truly loves and cares for them, the sky’s the limit for what [students] will do.” 

As a new school year dawns, educators and students are heading back with some good news: For the first time since lockdowns caused schools to shutter, students at both high- and low-poverty schools in the 2021-2022 academic year learned at rates that matched or sometimes exceeded pre-pandemic growth rates, according to a summer report from NWEA, a nonprofit that creates academic assessments for schools. That offers hope that kids are persevering and can rebound from learning disruptions that, by some estimates, could decrease their lifetime earnings by as much as $61,000 or set back the global economy by $1.6 trillion. 

Yet serious concerns remain, education researchers caution. Even though the rate of learning improved to a normal pace, many students still have a big hole to climb out of, and test scores in math and reading continue to lag behind pre-pandemic trends. NWEA projects it will take another three to five years for students to fully catch up. Systems that schools added to respond to the pandemic – like more instructional time, tutoring, and expanded summer programs – need to be sustained, experts say. If they aren’t, gaps between students of different wealth levels and races may broaden, and young people won’t be prepared for future opportunities. 

“We are moving in the right direction, but at the same time there’s going to be a fiscal cliff that schools are going to face in the near future when that federal aid runs out and schools are also facing a tight and difficult labor market for hiring staff,” says Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University. “We cannot assume that the encouraging signs of progress will automatically continue. Increasing this upward positive momentum is going to take even more work.” 

And for some advocates, getting back to pre-pandemic levels of learning isn’t enough. Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP, a nonprofit formerly known as The New Teacher Project, says a return to pre-pandemic status is like a child earning C grades, dropping to D’s during the pandemic, and getting back to C’s. 

“It’s not like the pre-pandemic outcomes were good,” says Dr. Brownie. “If you look at the literacy rates and outcomes before the pandemic, some states were making some small and incremental improvements, which we should applaud, but we can’t be comfortable that getting back to pre-pandemic results is where we ever want or can afford to be.”

Recovery underway 

School leaders, teachers, and families have taken varying approaches to tackling the disruption that COVID-19 unleashed on education and are seeing some signs of progress they’ll build on in the new school year. 

A survey released this month by the National Center for Education Statistics found that staff at public schools rated strategies such as remedial instruction, high-dosage tutoring, and teacher professional development about learning recovery as most effective for mitigating pandemic woes. 

Some of those strategies are in use at Steubenville City Schools, a small district in northeastern Ohio that reopened quickly for in-person learning five days a week in fall 2020 with safety measures in place. The district hired additional tutors and had teachers run “solution teams” to address issues like student absenteeism and family engagement in a community with more than one-third of student families living in poverty and half eligible for government food assistance. 

Assessments in spring 2020 showed students had fallen behind normal achievement, says Steubenville Superintendent Melinda Young. By spring 2022, scores were “pretty close to what we’ve always gotten,” she says.

As data becomes available for the 2021-2022 school year, other signs of recovery are evident. Statewide tests this spring in Georgia and Texas showed students had improved from the previous year, although they remained behind where students typically scored pre-pandemic. And in Texas, which released data categorized by income and race, gaps between low-income, Black, and/or Latino students and their white and Asian peers persisted. In Tennessee, which invested heavily in strategies like high-dosage tutoring, students, regardless of race or income, were largely back to pre-pandemic levels in spring 2022 state tests, although achievement gaps between groups persist.  

Nikki Mueller, a mom of two elementary school students in Tigard, Oregon, believes her youngest son, a kindergartner when the pandemic hit, fell behind where he would have been in reading and writing. Returning to school in person after a year learning remotely helped, and she’s hopeful this will be a “bump on the road” for her child and his peers. 

“I think that the longer they are back in school, the better it will get. I’m optimistic that our kids will get there – they might just need a little more time,” Ms. Mueller says. 

Elementary students, who were hit especially hard in reading and math, showed some of the largest gains in learning this past year, according to the NWEA report, which is based on analysis of the MAP Growth assessment that the nonprofit administered to 8.3 million students in grades three through eight. 

Of special concern in the report, however, are students in high-poverty schools, who have more missed learning to make up, and middle schoolers nationally, who backslid on math and didn’t make any gains in reading this year according to the data.

Individually, though, students can show strong determination. Echo He, a rising high school junior in Sammamish, Washington, moved to the United States from China her freshman year. Adjusting to a new country while going to school online and learning English was daunting, but she was motivated to prove that coming to the U.S. was a good decision. 

“I was really eager to adapt to a new community, … and I was trying my best to create a sense of belonging,” says Echo. “I shifted from being not a good student with online learning to [choosing] to engage in the conversation, interact with teachers, and I think that helped a lot.” 

“Extra time and effort” 

Education researchers worry that overemphasizing learning rebounds might take attention away from efforts still needed to reach full recovery. “This is not the moment to take our foot off the gas,” says Karyn Lewis, NWEA report co-author and director of its Center for School and Student Progress. 

“People are desperate to get back to something they perceive as more normal,” says Dr. Kraft. “It’s mentally taxing to be in urgent mode over a sustained period of time.” But if recovery focuses only on short-term patches, it will fail children in the long run, he says. 

Many educators are still feeling urgency about mitigating the pandemic’s effects, and that’s likely contributing to teacher burnout, says Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher who studies education at Rand Corp. 

“The majority of teachers want to be there, want to help kids,” Dr. Augustine says. “If they see students are further behind, they are going to be concerned and put extra time and effort in.” 

Jamie Garcia Caycho, a teacher in Gwinnett County Public Schools outside Atlanta, saw her first graders make large growth in their oral language skills this past year, but she worries about statistics showing that if students don’t meet measures like reading proficiency by third grade, they are more likely to fail or drop out of high school.

“I do feel that pressure that we need to make sure they are at a certain level,” says Ms. Caycho. “Being patient, looking at their growth over time, keeps me going. ... Their success is a reflection of our communities and where we’re going.”