8th graders will start high school a full year behind

New test results show millions of students in grades 3-8 require months of additional school to catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels, according to an analysis of MAP Growth reading and math assessments by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

The analysis examined test scores from approximately 7.7 million students in 22,400 public schools who have taken MAP Growth reading and math assessments since COVID-19. Those scores were then compared to a similar group of 10 million students who took the tests during pre-COVID school years, revealing substantial achievement gaps remained and widened further between fall 2023 and spring 2024 for most grades. As an example, the reading achievement gap for current seventh-graders is now more than twice as large as it was in fall 2022 for this cohort, NWEA explains.

To further contextualize the significance of these gaps, NWEA calculated estimates of additional learning required to catch students up to pre-COVID achievement levels.

Eighth-grade results were particularly sobering — students entering high school this fall will need a full school year (9 months) of additional learning to catch up to pre-COVID levels in reading and math. The average student will need around half of an additional school year to catch up — 4.8 additional months for reading and 4.3 months for math, respectively.

(And, as a reminder, this would only return students to pre-COVID levels, which had their own achievement disparities that needed addressing.)

Months of school required to catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels by grade level

Chart note from NWEA: The bars (scaled to the left axis) depict the absolute magnitude of spring 2024 achievement gaps for reading (in blue) and math (in magenta). The values at the bottom of each bar are the standardized mean differences between the COVID and pre-COVID sample for each cohort. The green line and accompanying values in gray ovals (scaled to the right axis) capture months of schooling required to close achievement gaps and catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels. Estimates were calculated by taking the mean score differences between the COVID and pre-COVID samples and dividing by the average pre-COVID fall-to-spring growth rates.

NWEA’s recent findings largely mirror the findings in their analysis of the 2022-23 school year: Growth still lags pre-COVID trends in most grades. “Students, especially older ones, remain a long way from recovery.”

Because MAP Growth is administered multiple times throughout the year, the data can “hel[p] us understand how cohorts of students are progressing toward recovery” and “captures more incremental changes and trends that annual state assessments might miss,” notes the NWEA.

“At the end of 2021–22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” concludes the NWEA. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion.”