American students are losing ground in reading and math as COVID relief dollars run dry

Academic progress is heading in the wrong direction in the years since the pandemic. Students are falling further behind as schools face the impending loss of COVID-19 relief funding aimed at helping them recover from severe setbacks in math and reading.

New research published Tuesday shows that more than four years since the start of the pandemic eighth graders are a full year behind in math and reading. The average U.S. student needs more than four months of school to catch up to pre-pandemic achievement levels, the study found.

"Growth has slowed to lag pre-pandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point," the report from NWEA says. The report analyzes recent test score data from third- to eighth-grade students in 22,400 public schools nationwide.

Marginalized students continue to be the most likely to be behind, the research shows.

Kids haven't made much headway since the prior school year or the year before that, the research found. USA TODAY previously reported that schools were failing to help third and fourth graders catch up to pre-pandemic reading and math levels. Schools were stymied in part by increased absenteeism, setbacks in student behavior and a slew of staffing departures and absences.

"It's disheartening to say the least," said Karyn Lewis, one of the authors of the study and the director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA, referencing the lack of progress from the prior year to the most recent school year. The widening achievement gaps in sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade reading levels are especially concerning, she said. The research shows students' reading achievement in those grades dropped below pre-pandemic averages.

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At the start of the 2022-23 school year, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the pandemic-related academic setbacks illuminated in the federal Nation's Report Card were "not acceptable." Those test scores revealed dramatic declines in math and reading scores for the nation's fourth and eighth graders, showing how pandemic-related disruptions interrupted learning for American students.

Cardona urged schools at the time to leverage the billions of dollars the Biden administration made available through the American Rescue Plan to combat the decline in academic progress.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund dollars are set to disappear at the end of September. Districts must commit their funds by that deadline.

As the lag in skills persists, there will be less federal money to propel student achievement in the years to come, Marguerite Roza and Katherine Silberstein wrote in a piece for The Brookings Institution .

"While amounts vary across districts, on average, that equates to a single-year reduction in spending of over $1,000 per student," Roza and Silberstein wrote.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: American students are losing ground in reading and math as COVID relief dollars run dry