Five years after classrooms first shut down, students still haven’t caught up to where they were before COVID-19.
The pandemic’s academic toll remains nationwide, with only modest gains in reading and even slower progress in math, according to an annual report from Curriculum Associates, a company that provides curriculum and classroom-based testing programs.
Overall academic achievement trends are largely unchanged from the 2021-22 school year, but the pandemic’s impact varies significantly across student populations. The report draws on data from more than 11 million K-8 students in reading and 13 million in math.
“We should hold ourselves accountable to not just getting back to the level of achievement that we were seeing pre-pandemic—even that was just a stepping stone toward the real goal of getting all students to reach their potential,” said Kristen Huff, the head of measurement of Curriculum Associates.
The findings come from the company’s i-Ready Diagnostic, which assesses students’ reading and math skills, and compares them with pre-pandemic averages.
The share of students meeting grade-level benchmarks has been flat since spring 2023, with only a slight uptick by spring 2025.
Since the pandemic, schools have been grappling with increased rates of chronic absenteeism and student mental health challenges. Schools received an infusion of $190 billion in federal COVID-19 relief aid to help catch students up. While research shows the relief did lead to some improved academic outcomes, experts concluded that it wasn’t enough to get students fully back on track.
Gains for some students, while math recovery lags reading
While national recovery remains slow, some groups are seeing academic gains.
Among 8th graders in schools where more than half the students are Black, the share meeting grade-level reading standards rose to 39.3% in spring 2025, up from 36.4% in spring 2024 and 35.6% in 2019.
In contrast, 48% of 1st graders in similar schools met grade-level reading benchmarks in 2025, down from 54.5% in 2019.
For Huff, those results raise an important question: What’s working in schools that outperform expectations despite fewer resources?
“We used statistical analysis to find schools, and we weren’t looking for schools with a lot of resources,” Huff said. “We wanted to find schools that were really bucking the trend in terms of economics and other factors.”
Reading performance in many grades is nearing or surpassing pre-pandemic levels. But in math, students remain 1 to 16.9 percentage points below 2019 benchmarks, depending on grade level. Using spring 2019 as a baseline, Huff said, helps researchers isolate COVID’s impact from other factors.
“Learning is happening,” Huff said. “It’s just that if we want to get—as a first stepping stone—back to where we were before learning was disrupted, that growth needs to accelerate. We know that there are ways to encourage that acceleration, and that’s where I think the real conversation needs to be.”
As for the most effective way to close gaps, Huff emphasized that the quality of the curriculum outweighs whether it’s delivered via textbooks or digital tools.
“There’s a variety of quality regardless of the medium, so we are starting to build a very collective viewpoint on what constitutes high-quality instructional materials,” she said.
Before the pandemic, younger students (grades 1-4) already trailed older students in both reading and math—by 4 percentage points in math and 13 points in reading. Those gaps have remained relatively unchanged in 2024 and 2025.
Still, the report offers some hope: small but steady gains suggest recovery is possible.
“We need to see these learning trajectories accelerate, or next year and the year after, we’re not going to see the changes we want to see,” Huff said.
The pandemic acted as a “reset” moment, prompting educators to rethink how they help students rebuild skills, said Niyoka McCoy, the chief learning officer for K12, an online educational program that provides full-time schooling and tutoring services. (McCoy reviewed the report but did not work on the study.)
She hopes most students will meet grade-level expectations within the next five years and warns against letting the process take any longer.
“If you think about the longevity of our students and where we want them to be, we have to flip how we are educating them to get them back on track sooner than later,” McCoy said. “I just don’t think we can wait.”
