Young students less prepared for reading and math at grade level

Key points:

Children who were in early childhood learning programs during the pandemic are struggling to keep up with grade-level learning in math and English, according to School readiness for young students after the pandemicA new report from Curriculum Associates examines national data that quantify the latent academic impact of disrupted access to early childhood care and education for the nation's youngest students.

This report is one of the first to collect and analyze nationally representative data from more than five million students in grades K-2, thanks to its i-Ready® Diagnostics for Reading and for Mathematics.

“While learning disruptions are well known and documented for school-aged students due to the pandemic, less is known about the impact on children who were in early childhood or pre-K settings in 2020 and 2021. Those children , who were 1 to 4 years old at the start of the pandemic, are coming to school less prepared and lagging behind expectations with signs of slow recovery,” said Dr. Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates. “This data shows that post-pandemic recovery remains an uphill battle for millions of students across the country, reinforcing the challenges our educators face in the classroom every day.”

Some of the key findings include:

• Students appear to be less prepared upon entering school, with a higher proportion of students entering below grade level. Some grades demonstrate modest recovery.
  • Kindergarten students show latent, albeit small, declines in school readiness from before to after the pandemic, with nearly identical trends from 2019 to 2021, but show small declines in subsequent years.
  • Average test scores fell 2.8 points and 9.1 points for first- and second-graders, respectively, from before the pandemic to 2021. First-grade scores continue to decline heading into 2023, while second graders show modest signs of recovery.
• Trends in math achievement and school entry readiness show little sign of returning to a pre-pandemic level.
  • Kindergarten students again demonstrate a delayed impact of pandemic disruptions in math, with comparable trends from fall 2019 to fall 2021, but show small declines in performance in fall 2022 and 2023.
  • By comparison, students in grades 1 and 2 have seen steeper declines with less evidence of recovery, with average scores on the scale declining by 4.3 and 5.7 points, respectively, from 2019 to 2023.

While the pandemic disrupted all early childhood services and care, the report shows that the impact of this disruption was not felt equally in all communities. Many minority communities relied on continued access to public preschool programs and therefore lost services completely with the pandemic closures. These findings echo emerging trends outlined in the latest edition of Curriculum Associates' Research on the state of student learning.

“As we analyze this data by various demographics, such as grade, race and income level, we recognize a familiar phenomenon: the pandemic exacerbated educational socioeconomic inequalities,” said Tyrone Holmes, chief inclusion officer at Curriculum Associates. “The good news is that this data can help guide decision makers on how to best allocate resources and support the students most in need.”

“In an equitable world, every educator would have the support, tools and data to help every student reach their potential,” Huff continued. “Our students have faced tremendous hardships and the road ahead will not be easy. We owe it to them to be ambitious and change the course of learning now.”

School readiness for young students after the pandemic is the seventh in a series of research reports on the effects of unfinished learning by Curriculum Associates. You can find more information about Curriculum Associates' research on unfinished learning. here.

This press release originally appeared online.

Laura Ascione is the editorial director of eSchool Media. She graduated from the prestigious Philip Merrill School of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

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