After years of dire test scores coming out of the pandemic, new national test results released on Wednesday offered a glimmer of hope — at least for younger students.
The nation’s 9-year-olds, who were in preschool when the pandemic hit, have made a significant recovery in reading since 2022, and are now caught up to where 9-year-olds were immediately before the pandemic, according to a key federal exam. They are getting closer to being caught up in math.
But for American 13-year-olds, whose elementary school years were disrupted by the pandemic, there has been no recovery.
And overall, many students are worse off than they were in the early 2010s, when U.S. test scores peaked.
“We are seeing some bounce back from a historic low,” said Thomas Kane, an education professor at Harvard and a leading expert on student achievement. “But the long-term picture is troubling.”
The results come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has tested 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds periodically going back to the 1970s. It is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The test was given to a national sample of about 15,000 students in each age group, in late 2024 and early 2025.
Notably, some of the student groups that were the most behind saw some of the biggest gains, at least among 9-year-olds.
In both math and reading, improvements among younger students were driven by the lowest performers — students in the bottom 25 percent, who had been losing ground for years starting well before the pandemic. Nine-year-olds from lower-income households made gains, while their more affluent peers were stagnant. In math, Black 9-year-olds made up more ground than their white and Hispanic peers, and in reading, students with disabilities posted larger improvements.
Many of those groups had more ground to cover to begin with — low-scoring 9-year-olds are still behind where similar students were in 2012. Yet their improvement was no guarantee.
“We should be happy for any good news, and this is good news,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, who has written about the declines among low-performing students.
Researchers are now scrambling to understand what, exactly, made the difference for those students. “That’s one of the million-dollar questions,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
It’s possible that this cohort of 9-year-olds was simply less affected by pandemic school closures and other disruptions, compared with 9-year-olds who were last tested in 2022.
It’s also possible that low-performing students benefited from an influx of federal dollars pumped into schools during this period to help students recover from the pandemic. The money paid for services like tutoring for students who were academically struggling — and low-income school districts were given the most to spend.
At the same time, states across the country were overhauling how they taught reading, reforms that primarily affected younger students. Prior research has found that many — but not all — of the states that made changes saw reading bumps during this time period, suggesting that the reforms were helpful, but not the only factor.
Yet the lack of progress among 13-year-olds only underscored the broader challenges facing American education, beyond the pandemic.
Students are still missing far more days of school, a cultural shift since the pandemic that experts fear is becoming permanent. Teachers say that students are increasingly distracted by screens, both at school and at home. And the share of students who read for fun has declined significantly over the last decade, a sea change documented in the national test’s historical data.
From 1984 to 2012, the share of students reading for fun “almost every day” generally hovered above 50 percent for 9-year-olds, and ranged between 26 and 37 percent for 13-year-olds. After 2012 — a period that overlapped with the ubiquitous rollout of smartphones and social media — that figure plunged.
Today, just 37 percent of 9-year-olds report reading for fun almost every day. Among 13-year-olds, it is a dismal 14 percent.
Dr. Kane urged schools and policymakers to make an even greater, immediate push to reduce student absence rates, which he called “the most obvious low hanging fruit.” The issue is particularly urgent for 13-year-olds, who have only a few more years to make up ground before graduating high school.
And he pushed for a national reconsideration of children’s tech use and social media, a problem that he noted could be having more of an impact on older students.
“It’s not mysterious what’s going on,” Dr. Kane said. “It would be shocking if there had been a complete bounce back given the absence rates that we are seeing and given that students are reporting a big decline in reading for fun outside of school.”
“Yes, it was the pandemic,” he said, “but it clearly wasn’t just the pandemic.”
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