At the end of February, the assessment company NWEA released a report detailing their latest findings on learning loss recovery. The results painted a familiar picture.
From their analysis of fall 2024 data, a third of schools have recovered in either math or reading, while only one in seven have recovered in both. Looking at state assessment data from spring 2024, they found that only 17% of students were attending districts that had reached their pre-Covid math performance levels. Only 11% attended districts that had recovered their pre-Covid reading levels. In other words, 83% of students were attending districts that had not caught up in math, and 89% of students were attending districts that had not caught up in reading.
These findings mirror the latest NAEP results for 2024, which also found some progress in math but continued declines in reading. Some 40% of fourth graders were considered below NAEP basic in reading, a share that has risen six points since 2019 (34%) and nine points since 2015 (31%). Among eighth graders, a third (33%) were below basic, up from 27% just before the pandemic in 2019 and a low of 22% in 2013.
Clearly, something is not right. While the pandemic certainly didn’t do us any favors, it is clear there were other problems in play well before Covid closed the schools. Yet despite the challenges, education rarely, if ever, cracks into the top tier of issues that voters say are most important when deciding their vote for Congress. If education is in such dire straits nationwide, where is the political will to solve it?
This question is not meant to discount the efforts states like Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, and the progress they are seeing. This is good work yielding real results. But it is to ask why more states aren’t following the Southern Surge’s lead, and why voters across the country are not demanding more. Are voters not aware of the scale of the problem, seeing more stories about book bans or bathrooms instead? Or, is the problem seen as so challenging that people don’t feel they even know how to confront it?
The answers to these questions will inform how we talk to voters about these issues. But we should also be ready with solutions of our own. Last week, the Bipartisan Policy Center released its report, “A Nation at Risk to a Nation At Work: The Case For A National Talent Strategy,” on improving education and the workforce. It details recommendations for innovations in workforce policies, improving the talent pipeline, and improving student achievement outcomes by making federal and state education data more relevant, timely, and actionable and setting goals for improvement. The recommendations are a valuable, important first step in engaging the country on this important issue. But clearly, the work is just beginning.
