Today, test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—better known as the nation’s report card—were released, and they reflect significant setbacks for America’s students. Students’ academic progress slowed dramatically during the pandemic, and the post-pandemic academic recovery looks as big, and maybe bigger than we had thought.

We knew what to expect for results in fourth grade based on similar results released last month—large declines occurred across the board, but they were larger for low performers and in math than in reading. These new results reflect the same patterns, but also delivered even worse news on how eighth graders scored. Again, math declines were larger than reading, but eighth grade math scores dropped for high performers and low performers alike, by substantial margins.

The new NAEP data provide new information because they are comparable across states, and for 26 large school districts. Dishearteningly, there were no states or districts that escaped the pandemic fallout completely, though some states did worse than others. Overall, these results are a sobering reminder of how much work students and schools have to do to make up for lost progress, and the universal decline in eighth grade math is an exclamation point on that reminder.

One thing the NAEP results cannot address is whether districts or states that had more remote instruction fared worse on the tests, largely because the Department of Education did not track closures systematically. There is a clear rationale for expecting how closures would mirror NAEP results, as fully remote and hybrid instruction extended far longer in some districts and some states than others. We have seen those patterns in enrollments, and research has shown that students who had more remote instruction struggled more academically during the pandemic.

Our Return to Learn Tracker did systematically collect closure data. While matching them to overall state and district NAEP results is far too crude a comparison to draw conclusions from, the results below suggest the expected pattern is there, even if it is not as strong as some, including myself, might have guessed.

 In the charts below, I present changes in test results by state and district for reading and math in grades four and eight by their in-person learning options for 2020–21. Those were options, and in some states and districts, the time students could have been in-person won’t equal the time they actually were in person, even if those are highly correlated.

I strongly caution against drawing strong conclusions from the patterns below. While I believe that more remote instruction led to less academic progress, all else equal, many things need to be accounted for to satisfy that phrase, “all else equal.” Shifting enrollments, remote and in-person instructional program quality, students’ actual time in remote instruction, and the quality of schooling in the 2021–22 school year, all load on these patterns.

That caution noted, the first chart below shows change in grade four reading scores from 2019 to 2022 by a scale of in-person instructional offerings on the horizontal axis. The smaller declines on the right side suggests in-person learning made a difference in grade four reading scores. The grade four math scores, which were more affected during the pandemic show an even stronger pattern.

In eighth grade reading, the pattern is much too noisy to interpret much from. Note that the scale is limited to a gain of +2 points, which removes a laudable outlier—LAUSD’s remarkable 9-point gain in eighth grade reading. This lack of a pattern is striking for those who expected strong relationships between in-person instruction and students’ academic progress, though analyses more complex than these simple descriptive patterns may reveal more. On grade eight math, the pattern is more in line with expectations, with declines appearing larger where there was less in-person instruction.

It should not come as a surprise, not only given the data we have seen, but also given basic expectations,  that in-person school is good for students and their test scores. If anything, it is surprising the influence is not more evident here.  For the work of getting students caught up from these declines, it is not helpful to re-litigate debates over school closures (though they may be worth re-litigating for other purposes). However, the work of getting students caught up should not be pursued by ignoring those closures, and their influence on what students are facing today.

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