{"id":149905,"date":"2023-07-11T12:55:12","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T16:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/districtadministration.com\/?p=149905"},"modified":"2023-07-11T12:55:12","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T16:55:12","slug":"academic-growth-recovery-math-reading-lags-covid-pandemic-nwea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/districtadministration.com\/academic-growth-recovery-math-reading-lags-covid-pandemic-nwea\/","title":{"rendered":"Recovery on hold? How academic growth sputtered in 2022-23"},"content":{"rendered":"

The road to recovery remains rocky as the academic growth that most students made in the 2022-23 school year failed to match pre-pandemic norms, according to data on grades 3-8 released Tuesday. Many students may need to accomplish an extra year of learning in high school, though one bright spot is that students on the younger end of the NWEA’s scale exceeded expectations, the latest report <\/a>from the influential testing company found.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID-19 may no longer be an emergency, but we are very much still dealing with the fallout from the crisis,” said Karyn Lewis<\/a>, co-author of the study and director of NWEA’s Center for School and Student Progress. “These data reiterate that recovery will not be linear, easy, or quick and we cannot take our foot off the gas pedal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results show that most children need an additional 4.5 months of math instruction and 4.1 months of reading to catch up to the pre-COVID status quo and that Black and Hispanic students remain even further behind. But as most superintendents and their teams know, that level of additional instruction cannot be provided in a single year and the pre-pandemic status quo was already riddled with achievement gaps, NWEA asserted.<\/p>\n

\n

More from DA<\/strong>: 4 noteworthy superintendent hires, 1 surprising switch and a termination<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

“Scaling interventions takes significant time and resources, and we know the hard work of educators often takes years to show up in test results,\u201d added Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA.<\/p>\n

NWEA has previously found “modest signs” of academic recovery in grades 3\u20138 during the 2021\u201322 school year and into fall 2022. The latest analysis, which covers assessment scores for more than 6.7 million students in about 20,000 public schools, showed that third graders exceeded typical growth by 4% and fourth graders only slipped by 1%. Middle schoolers, however, did not perform nearly as well, falling 16-19% short of expectations in reading and by 6\u201310% in math, researchers noted.<\/p>\n

\n

Widening gap: Below-average gains in 2022-23 resulted in an increase in the gap between current test scores and prepandemic levels. pic.twitter.com\/8BzeaukjGH<\/a><\/p>\n

— Karyn Lewis (@KarynLew) July 11, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n