New Analysis Finds Lasting Impact for Students Affected by COVID School Lockdowns

Over four years after the start of mass school lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, many children are still feeling the educational effects. According to a new report from the testing nonprofit Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), student test score growth is still failing to rebound to pre-COVID levels, and some children would need as much as nine months of extra schooling to catch up.

"Our findings make it clear that the road to recovery from the pandemic's impact on student achievement is far from over," reads an NWEA research brief released this week. "The effects continue to reverberate, even for the youngest students entering the education system years after the initial onset of the pandemic. At the end of 2021–22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun. Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion."

NWEA researchers studied the scores of over 7.7 million public school students in grades 3–8 who took the nonprofit's reading and math assessments since the start of the pandemic. The NWEA found that test score gains continued to fall short of prepandemic trends for all but the youngest students during the 2023–24 school year.

These score gaps mean that the average eighth-grader would need over nine extra months of schooling to catch up with pre-COVID achievement levels. The least affected students—third-graders, most of whom would not even have been enrolled in school at the start of the pandemic—would need 2.2 months and 1.3 months of extra schooling to catch up in reading and math respectively. 

"At the end of the 2023–24 school year, across all grade levels, the average student will require the equivalent of 4.8 months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-COVID levels in reading and 4.3 months in math," the report reads. "Prepandemic rates of learning vary across grades and subjects. Younger students tend to make larger gains per year compared to older students, and math gains tend to be slightly larger than reading gains."

The report indicates that recovery is unlikely to be so easy and that many students are likely to continue struggling for the foreseeable future. While it will be years before the full educational impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is known, it's hard not to see how school lockdowns caused long-term—or permanent—damage to millions of students.

"Accepting a new normal of lower achievement and widened inequities is not an option," the report reads. "Instead, we must remain committed to using data-driven strategies to understand and address the specific impacts on our students, ensuring they receive the necessary supports to thrive."