Although schools have made up some pandemic-related learning loss, not enough students are receiving the support they need—and the federal dollars helping fund that support may dissipate before the most vulnerable are caught up.
That’s according to a report released Tuesday from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.
“The bottom line for us was: This is not over,” said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education during a press call. “It’s not a thing of the past and it’s probably not going to be for some time.”
The center has followed recovery efforts for three years, taking stock on how American students are faring following the height of the pandemic. This year, researchers dug into special populations—students with special needs, English learners, and homeless students—to see how the most vulnerable students are recovering.
When the researchers looked at different data points from across the country of the various hurdles facing K-12 education—like chronic absenteeism and staffing challenges—there was a disproportionate impact on those students “across the board,” said Lake.
The pandemic “just showed that those students were already in academic settings that weren’t necessarily maximizing their talents and providing the opportunities that those students need,” said Eric Duncan, the director of P-12 policy for EdTrust. The equitable education advocacy organization was not involved in the center’s report.
“It makes sense that you would see, unfortunately, larger gaps in terms of academic progress and recovery overall for populations that have been vulnerable and underserved for many decades in our education system,” he said.
And there’s a litany of “gale-force headwinds” that are prohibiting the system from making forward progress, the report says: Teacher morale is low, there are significant mental health concerns for students, federal funds will soon no longer support recovery efforts, and there’s a lack of transparency from both districts and states about how students are doing academically.
“When we started doing this report, we thought it would be five years of reporting. We’re starting to believe that recovery is going to take a lot longer than that, that COVID may have left an indelible mark to some degree, especially if we don’t shift course,” Lake said.
Here are some key takeaways from the report.
Academic recovery is slowly happening, but students who were already behind are now further behind
There are glimmers of good news in an admittedly “depressing” report, Lake said. Proven recovery efforts are at work, like tutoring and extended learning time.
The average student has recovered roughly a third of their learning losses in math and a quarter in reading, the report finds.
But recovery is happening slowly, which means older students with less time to go in the K-12 system will graduate at a disadvantage, and there are widening gaps for younger students.
The students who were already behind, however, are falling even further behind, with the chasms between the lowest- and highest-achieving students only widening, according to the report. Students from low-income districts are making noticeably slower recovery.
In districts with low poverty rates, students have made a full recovery in reading and gained further ground, but districts with higher rates of poverty have “languished,” the report indicates.
English learners continued to score lower than pre-pandemic averages on English-proficiency assessments. For students in every grade level that took the WIDA Access test, which is used in 41 states and the District of Columbia, last year’s scores were the lowest since 2018.
The achievement gaps for students based on race, income, disability status, and English-language proficiency took additional academic hits since the pandemic, Lake said.
“It’s shocking they could go lower than they already were and alarming when we don’t see them popping back up to where they already were,” she said.
There has been a surge in special education referrals
In the 2022-23 academic year, 7.5 million students received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. There’s been a marked increase in the last two years in students being identified as needing special education services, with more referrals for students entering kindergarten with academic and social struggles, according to the report.
The number of special education students dipped slightly during the pandemic—which researchers say was likely a result of underidentification. With rates increasing, it’s a question of: Are educators just catching up, or is overidentification now happening, particularly for the “COVID babies”—students who didn’t have access to preschool and normal socialization, Lake said.
“Are they being funneled into special education as a solution, or do they really have a disability that needs to be addressed in special ed.? Is special ed. equipped to deal with this influx? What are the funding implications and the staffing implications here?” she said. “What we know is that educators on the ground are saying in the early grades, there’s more going on than just low test scores. There’s a lot of behavior stuff happening and a lot of kids who are getting flagged when they wouldn’t necessarily have been [before].”
Older students are catching up, but younger students are falling behind or holding steady with below historical trends in reading or math, the report states. The widening disparities for younger students become more nuanced when layering race and income status.
There’s a lack of transparent student-performance data
The first step is for policymakers to admit there’s a problem, Lake said.
“We don’t seem to be there yet,” she said.
Few states are transparently sharing data about academic recovery, according to the report. Just seven states make it easy to see longitudinal performance data.
Sixteen states made it “all but impossible” to find and track longitudinal performance trends. Even further, many state websites were “borderline unusable—even for education policy experts and researchers,” the report says.
One of the most significant hurdles for addressing academic recovery—students’ presence in schools—also hasn’t seen much discussion from politicians. According to the report, in 38 gubernatorial state of the state speeches in 2024, there wasn’t much focus on chronic absenteeism.
But even on a local level, there’s a lack of communication about how students are faring, the report finds. Parents are “getting a misleadingly rosy picture from report cards,” it says, and don’t know when their children have fallen behind.
“We heard story after story about parents feeling like they weren’t getting the communication that they wanted to have from schools,” Lake said.
One parent told researchers that at the end of the school year, the school said their child wasn’t ready to graduate “‘cause apparently he had two Fs, and I didn’t know until we were in the process of graduation.”
There are ways to address the issues
Federal funding dollars—about $200 billion—did help, Lake said, but not enough. Two studies found that ESSER funding did “move the needle of student achievement.”
But “if money is not geared toward the things that we know work, it won’t make a difference,” Lake said.
“It’s going to be a tricky time, in the course of the next few years—the needs are not going away, but many of the dollars are, especially at the federal level,” she said.
Districts have until the end of this month to commit all their funds from the latest round of federal aid. They have another several months to spend that money—transferring it from a district account to a vendor or employee by Jan. 31, 2025, for work completed before October 2024.
At the local level, though, the report urges schools to prioritize relationships between families and educators.
It also urges schools to “tear down the walls”-—examine how they identify students with disabilities and abandon “flawed and outdated approaches” in their processes. It encourages schools to avoid pitting tutoring against special education services and pullout services against academic instruction.
Ensuring tutoring and small-group sessions are a regular part of education is also essential, the report says. Schools should also help students plan for after graduation, through exposure to career options via credits and credentials they can gain before graduating from high school.
The EdTrust’s Duncan said promising movement has been seen from strategic investments born from the pandemic-recovery efforts—"things that vulnerable student populations haven’t historically had equitable access to,” he said. That includes high-dosage tutoring and academic enrichment, plus other social-emotional and developmental programming.
“That’s what we’re hoping to build off of in the next few years,” he said.
