Schools with a majority of Black students — those who fell the furthest behind during the pandemic — are making small gains in performance, according to the latest results of a widely-used national assessment.
In eighth grade reading, the percentage of students on grade level or above in those schools grew at three percentage points over last year — from 36% to 39%. In math, the percentage of fourth graders on track in majority-Black schools grew from 36% to almost 40%, the latest i-Ready assessments from Curriculum Associates found.
Those are “bright spots” in a snapshot that otherwise shows recovery has remained stagnant five years following the pandemic, said Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates.
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Black students “had a bigger dip, especially in the early grades, so they have more room to catch up,” she said. But generally, performance has plateaued and there’s still a long way to go to reach 2018-19 levels. “I think we have to hold ourselves accountable to at least that bar, but that’s not the end goal.”
The 2024-25 data, shared exclusively with The 74, represents almost 12 million K-8 students in reading and more than 13 million in math who took the i-Ready tests during the last school year. Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the i-Ready adjusts questions to students’ level. The prompts are more advanced if kids are working above the benchmark and easier if they’re below, offering teachers a view, Huff said, of how much progress students need to make to catch up. Nearly half of fifth graders, for example, are on grade level in reading, while 29% are two grade levels or more below, the results show. The picture is similar in math, with 53% on target and 20% far behind.
While students are learning, they’re not mastering as much material as their peers did before COVID. Learning loss is more pronounced in the younger grades, confirming that even those students who were too young to attend school were affected by the disruption. Multiple studies have shown that economic hardship and fewer opportunities to socialize left young children less prepared for school. In reading, 60% of first graders — those who were toddlers during the early years of the pandemic — are on grade level. That’s down from 68% in 2018-19.
The blue bars show the percentage of students on grade level or above, while the orange bars show the percentage at least two grade levels below. (Curriculum Associates)
‘Slight improvement’
Majority-Black schools, however, were well behind majority-white schools before COVID — by roughly 20 percentage points. Their scores also saw a steeper drop off after the pandemic.
About a year after the pandemic, McKinsey &Company, a consulting firm, used i-Ready data to show that students in majority-Black schools were a full year behind those in predominantly white schools, an increase of three months over the prior achievement gap.
“Black students were often at the lowest achievement levels in many districts,” said Kareem Weaver, co-founder of Fulcrum, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that provides literacy expertise to school districts. “It makes you wonder what was happening before for students to be at a level where even slight improvement is considered noteworthy.”
Students in Majority Black Schools Now a Full 12 Months Behind White Peers
If students don’t acquire strong reading skills and basic math facts in elementary school, they won’t be able to keep up with more challenging assignments, said Ameenah Poole, who worked as a high school administrator in East Orange, New Jersey, until 2022. Her former colleagues, she said, often wondered why students came to them as struggling readers and lacking proficiency in math.
“These foundational skills are paramount,” said Poole, now principal of Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary in the district.
In a school already not meeting expectations under the state’s accountability system, the pandemic just put kids further behind. Many parents in the 84% Black school have jobs in the service industry. Some are nurses, one drives an Amazon truck, Poole said, and most parents didn’t work from home when schools went remote.
A lot of students didn’t even log in to class, and rebuilding attendance routines has been slow and sometimes futile, she said.
“The culture during the pandemic and post-pandemic [was] that school was an option,” she said. “We say, ‘If you miss a day, you miss a lot.’ Students have to be here in order for us to teach them.”
Bianca Rouse, left, a teacher at Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary, met with a parent to discuss test data. (Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary)
On New Jersey’s state test, 19% of third graders met the standards in reading in 2022. That’s the same year the district began using i-Ready. Students work on skills like phonics and vocabulary or measurement and geometry in 40-minute blocks every week.
At first, the extra instruction didn’t translate into higher scores. In fourth grade, the percentage of students reaching the proficient level actually fell to 11%. But when those same students were fifth graders in 2024, Poole began to see the payoff. Thirty-five percent met or exceeded the goal.
That still means the majority of students are working below grade level, which the i-Ready data also shows.
Student learning is “moving in the right direction,” said Huff with Curriculum Associates, “but it’s not accelerating fast enough.”
In first and fourth grade, students showed more growth from fall (light blue) to spring (dark blue) before the pandemic than they do now. (Curriculum Associates)
The way the i-Ready results are reported, however, could be hiding some improvement, suggested Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.
Identifying the total percentage above and below the threshold doesn’t capture those students who may have moved up a level or two over time. Districts are “far from full recovery,” he wrote in an analysis of assessment data from 28 states. But he concluded that $190 billion in COVID relief, the largest-ever one-time infusion of federal funds for schools, contributed to a significant increase in math performance during the 2022-23 school year.
Research: Learning Recovery Has Stalled, Despite Billions in Pandemic Aid
Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham City schools in Alabama, saw evidence of that in his district.
“I told the teachers, ‘You [will] have to teach like you’ve never taught before,’ meaning that we had to make up multiple grades within a year because of unfinished learning,” he said.
Students in third, fifth and seventh grade in the Birmingham City schools outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. (Curriculum Associates)
A 2024 Curriculum Associates case study showed that Birmingham, where 89% of students are Black and 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University highlighted the district for the same reason.
Leaders rearranged the calendar so that at the end of every nine-week session, students had a week off. But teachers provided optional instruction during that open week. About 7,000 students participated “when they didn’t have to come to school,” Sullivan said. “We’re seeing the fruits of that.”