When Tom Kane looked at the results of the latest Education Recovery Scorecard, he noticed a few trends. The scorecard report analyzes state and nationwide school test scores to show how students in grades three through eight have fared in the years since the pandemic ushered in widespread learning loss.
Kane, an education professor at Harvard and director of the university’s Center for Education Policy Research, which helped produce the report, noted that when schools shut down, students’ math skills dropped much more than their English skills.
This wasn’t a big surprise. Data has long shown that math performance was hit harder by pandemic-era learning loss. In the years since the return to in-person instruction, however, many districts have begun to make small gains in math performance.
Then, he noticed something else.
“The big puzzle was not why math fell more between 2019 and 2022 than reading, the big puzzle is why did reading keep falling?” Kane said.
Larger Pandemic-era Drops in Math, Quicker Recovery
From 2019, before the pandemic, to 2022, the first post-pandemic year for which we had new testing data, student performance dropped across the board. But nationwide, math performance tended to drop more than English scores.
That has also been the trend in San Diego County districts, according to data from the scorecard. On average, districts lost about .35 grade levels of learning in math from 2019 to 2022.
Ayesha Hashim, a senior research scientist at NWEA, a nonprofit that creates, administers and analyzes results from student assessments, said this trend has been well-documented in recent years. It’s likely because teachers play a pivotal role in teaching kids’ math.
“Direct instruction in the classroom and getting formal instruction from a teacher really seems to affect and drive math learning. So, when you don’t have it, when schools are closed, learning suffers,” Hashim said.
Conversely, “when schools reopened and you’re able to provide that direct instruction again, learning recovers,” she said.
Local data also bears that out. From 2022 to last year, county districts saw a slight uptick in math performance, with students on average gaining the equivalent of about .1 grade level in learning. Of 30 local districts, about 77 percent saw an improvement in math performance during that period.
Smaller Pandemic-era Drops in English, Stalled Recovery
The trend in English performance, however, is the exact opposite. Overall, county students lost about .24 grade levels in reading between 2019 and 2022. It was a meaningful, but less severe drop than students saw in math performance.
This makes a degree of intuitive sense. Kids are likely learning English through a variety of means like reading with parents or absorbing new words as they hear them. So, some degree of exposure to reading, or at the very least English concepts, likely continued at home despite the disruption of the pandemic. On the other hand, kids were probably less likely to be exposed to long division or multiplication as they moved through the world.
But something else has been happening as well. Over the past two years, while student math performance has crept up, reading performance has continued to fall. In fact, despite the shakeup of the pandemic, the about .32 grade level drop in reading students experienced between 2022 and 2024 was larger than the drop during the pandemic years.
During those years, students in 23 of 30 local districts gained ground in math, according to the report. Meanwhile, every single local district lost ground in English
“I don’t have a good story for that,” Kane said. ” But one hypothesis is that the increasing use of social media and non-text-based material on phones and other devices means that students are just reading less in their daily life than they used to.”
That hypothesis isn’t out of left field. According to Kane’s Education Recovery Scorecard, performance has been dropping for years – even before the pandemic. Many districts saw upward progress in reading performance halt and begin to tick down between 2017 and 2019.
“The decline in the couple of years before the pandemic, that was something we saw in a lot of places,” Kane said. “It seems to point to it not just the pandemic driving reading performance down.”
‘It’s Not Over for Us’
It would be hard to find a district as representative of the averages of districts countywide as La Mesa-Spring Valley Schools.
On average, districts in San Diego County lost about .35 grade levels of learning in math between 2019 and 2022. So did La Mesa-Spring Valley. In the years since, districts have gained about .1 grade levels. La Mesa-Spring Valley gained about .08 grade levels. On the English side, districts have lost about .56 grade levels since 2019. La Mesa-Spring Valley has lost about .54 grade levels.
That’s why I contacted David Feliciano, who took over as superintendent of the district in 2019, the year before Covid hit. I wanted to ask him if there were things he’d seen that could explain the trends we’ve seen across the country – and locally.
In an email, he wrote that the pandemic exacerbated a whole lot of challenges districts were already grappling with. Chronic absenteeism, long understood as one of the key predictors of student performance, skyrocketed. That factor alone stymied some efforts to help kids recover, because learning interventions don’t mean anything if kids aren’t in class to experience them. Districts have for years seen a rise in the number of students eligible for special education services, despite no commensurate increase in funding for those services. After the pandemic, that trend became even more acute.
To Feliciano, the pandemic-era drops in math performance are most likely explained by the limitations of distance learning. While math involves a whole range of skills, like problem solving and critical thinking, he said some of those things were more difficult for teachers to impart through a computer screen.
“So much of distance learning, unfortunately, had to be focused on things that kids were able to do independently or with the assistance of their parents,” Feliciano wrote. “I think that math became more about learning the what of the math (the algorithms) and less of the why.”
When it comes to students’ continued struggles in English, Feliciano wrote that the time spent online meant that teachers were having to teach in ways that were different than what they were used to. Even when students returned in-person, they still had to be physically distanced from their peers, meaning they couldn’t collaborate or work in groups as much as they had before the pandemic.
“And it wasn’t the best way to engage students in critical thinking and learning,” Feliciano wrote.
Those factors have led many students to become very “adult-dependent learners,” Feliciano wrote.
“We have had to work really hard, and very specifically, on developing independence for our students in our teaching practices – while also making sure that we are meeting the needs of all of the students in the class,” He wrote. “We don’t know that anyone really recognizes how incredibly challenging this is for teachers.”
In the years since the shutdowns, the district has implemented all sorts of interventions aimed at catching kids back up. They stood up an academic summer the two years after Covid hit. They hired literacy intervention teachers for students who needed extra help and data support teachers that help monitor student progress and develop goals. They brought in additional counselors and social workers to support students’ social and emotional needs and help address the rise in chronic absenteeism.
Still, some of the negative effects of the pandemic haven’t gone away – even as the one-time funding meant to help schools recover has. Seeing reports like the Education Recovery Scorecard always feels heavy, Feliciano wrote. Because as districts continue to grapple with the impact of the pandemic on learning, many are now also grappling with major budget deficits, meaning they’re facing the prospect of having to potentially cut the very programs they implemented to help kids recover.
“We continue to deal with the impact of the pandemic on a daily basis, and it’s not going to go away any time soon,” Feliciano wrote.