The findings from Wednesday’s release of the latest NAEP Long Term Trends data were a mixed bag. On the one hand, nine year olds posted some real improvements in reading and math from 2022 to 2025. Thirteen year-olds, on the other hand, were virtually stagnant or had declined from 2023 (when they were assessed) to 2025.
The last long term trending NAEP release four years ago painted a dire portrait of what had happened to student learning during the pandemic, with The New York Times saying bluntly, “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading.” At the time, Dr. Andrew Ho of Harvard estimated that a point on NAEP roughly corresponded to three weeks of learning, meaning that 12 points on the NAEP scale corresponded to a grade level, assuming a 36-week school year. Comparing the 2022 data to 2020, our own analysis found that students would need about 21 weeks of instruction to fully regain ground in math.
How do the 2025 data compare? In math, nine year-olds went from a being seven points off their 2020 baseline in 2022 to being behind by only 3 points in 2025. Instead of needing 21 weeks of math instruction, nine year-olds are only about 9 weeks of instruction away from their math baseline, meaning that in the last three years they have had the equivalent of about 12 extra weeks of math instruction.
In reading, the story is similar. Nine-year olds’ reading scores declined by five points from 2020 to 2022, meaning roughly 15 weeks of instruction needed to recover to 2020 levels. But in 2025, their reading scores were only two points off of 2020, about six weeks of instruction. That means that in the last three years, third and fourth graders have had the equivalent of nine extra weeks of reading instruction. Thirteen year-olds, on the other hand, still need about 30 weeks of math instruction and 12 weeks of reading instruction to return to their 2020 baselines.
Of course, this is a very inexact analysis, owing both to the difficulty of mapping the NAEP scale onto a school year and to the fact that the nine year-olds assessed in 2025 were only in preschool in 2020. It was their older peers who bore the brunt of the school closures and learning disruption. Nevertheless, these numbers underscore the positive direction for achievement among our youngest learners, and emphasize the importance of helping those who are older.
