Report: Eighth-Grade Students Need Whole School Year to Reach Pre-Pandemic Performance

Teacher and Students

An education organization that administers a nationwide assessment has found that students are still not performing as well as they were immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic and that students’ achievement gap worsened in the 2023-24 school year as compared to before COVID.

NWEA, which issues the Measures of Academic Progress, said in a report this week that some middle school students are still an entire school year behind where they were before the pandemic in almost every grade as schools are slated to run out of federal relief this fall.

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Student Test Scores Continue to Plummet Despite Hundreds of Billions in Pandemic Aid for Education

Student taking class online

Student test scores are continuing to fall four years after schools moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study released Tuesday by testing company Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

The paper found gaps in academic performance between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are widening, despite the record $190 billion in federal aid distributed to schools since the pandemic began. The findings — which were divulged from an analysis of test results from the 2023-24 school year for approximately 7.7 million students between the third and eighth grades — also come two years after experts had claimed a recovery in education was underway.

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