ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On one side of the classroom, students surrounded teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowels. In another corner, children read from a book together. Elsewhere, students sat behind laptops and received help reading from online teachers.
It was a normal school day for the third-graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia. But teachers were in the race to help students learn and conquer more and faster setbacks that persist since schools closed four years ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
America’s schools have begun to make progress in getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven across geographic and economic status, with millions of students – often those from marginalized groups – taking up little or no ground.
Nationally, students recovered a third of their pandemic losses in math during the last school year and a quarter of losses in reading, the study said. Education Recovery Scorecardan analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.
But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to decline during the 2022-2023 school year, after earlier declines during the pandemic.
The recovery is clouded by a looming financial crisis. States have used some of the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic relief to help students catch upbut that money will run out later this year.
“The recovery is not yet complete, and it won’t be without state action,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist behind the scorecard. “States need to start planning for what they will do when federal money runs out in September. And I think very few states have actually started that discussion.”
Virginia lawmakers approved an additional $418 million last year to speed the recovery. Massachusetts officials have set aside $3.2 million to provide math tutoring for fourth- and eighth-grade students who are behind grade level, along with $8 million for literacy tutoring.
But among the other states with lagging progress, few said they were changing their strategies or increasing spending to speed improvement.
Virginia hired online tutoring companies and gave schools a “playbook” showing how to create effective tutoring programs. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said last year’s state test scores were a wake-up call.
“We didn’t recover as quickly as we needed to,” Coons said in an interview.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has called on states to continue funding additional academic aid for students as federal money expires.
“We just can’t stop now,” he said at a conference for education journalists on May 30. “States must recognize that these interventions work. Funding public education does make a difference.”
In Virginia, Alexandria County received $2.3 million in additional state money to expand tutoring.
At Mount Vernon, where classes are taught in English and Spanish, students are divided into groups and rotate through stations tailored to their skill level. Those who need the most help receive online tutoring. In Fletcher’s classroom, a handful of students wore headsets and worked with teachers through Ignite Learning, one of the companies hired by the state.
With tutors in high demand, the online option has been a big help, says Mount Vernon principal Jennifer Hamilton.
“That’s something we just can’t provide here,” she said.
Ana Marisela Ventura Moreno said her 9-year-old daughter, Sabrina, benefited significantly from additional reading help in second grade last year, but she is still catching up.
‘She has to get better. She is not at the level she should be,” the mother said in Spanish. She noted that the school was not offering tutoring help this year, but she didn’t know why.
Alexandria education officials say students who score below the proficiency score or close to that cutoff will receive intensive counseling and should prioritize students with the greatest needs. Alexandria lagged behind the state average on math and reading exams in 2023, but is slowly improving.
More worrying to officials are the gaps: Among poorer students at Mount Vernon, only 24% scored proficient in math and 28% scored proficient in reading. That’s much lower than the numbers among wealthier students, and the gap is widening.
If students fail to get back on track, there can be serious consequences. The Harvard and Stanford researchers found that communities with higher test scores have higher incomes and fewer arrests and incarcerations. If pandemic setbacks become permanent, students could be haunted for the rest of their lives.
The Education Recovery Scorecard tracks about 30 states, all of which made at least some improvement in math between 2022 and 2023. The states whose reading scores fell during that period, in addition to Virginia, were Nevada, California, South Dakota, Wyoming and Indiana . , Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington.
Only a few states have returned to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math performance rose above 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana did so in reading.
In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score increased by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level between 2022 and 2023. The math gains were less dramatic, with students still nearly half a grade behind 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement on changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal aid.
The district trained hundreds of Chicagoans to work as teachers. Each school building was assigned an interventionist, an educator who focuses on helping struggling students.
The district also used federal money for that home visits and expanded arts education in an effort to re-engage students.
“Academic recovery in itself, only through ‘drill and kill’, either tutoring or interventions, is not effective,” said Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer. “Students must feel involved.”
At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the city’s south side, only 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% met the target. Federal aid allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers are paid to collaborate on recovery after hours.
In the classroom, the school placed a sharper emphasis on collaboration. Coupled with academic setbacks, students returned from school closures with lower maturity levels, said Principal Vincent Izuegbu. By building lessons around discussion, officials found that students were more interested in learning.
“We don’t let ten minutes go by without a teacher giving students an opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth we’ve seen.”
Olorunkemi Atoyebi was an A-student before the pandemic, but after learning from home in fifth grade, she fell behind. During remote learning, she felt nervous about pausing class to ask questions. It wasn’t long before math lessons became pointless.
When she went back to school, she struggled with multiplication and terms like “dividend” and “divisor” confused her.
While other students worked in groups, her math teacher took her aside for individual help. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize the multiplication tables. Over time things started to click.
“They gave me more confidence in everything,” says Atoyebi, now fourteen. ‘My grades went up. My scores started to rise. Everything felt like I understood it better.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chrissie Thompson in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
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