A new report from Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, or EPIC, shows that while Michigan students have started to recover academically from disrupted learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, they have not yet fully “caught up” to pre-pandemic achievements.
The study shows that, following declines in both math and reading achievement over the course of the 2020-21 school year, Michigan students have made significant recovery in math but there’s very little change in reading.
EPIC researchers analyzed math and reading benchmark assessment scores for Michigan students in kindergarten through eighth grade during the 2020-21 through 2023-24 school years. Benchmark assessments monitor students’ progress toward grade-level standards and learning goals. They provide information that educators, policymakers and stakeholders can use to guide their instruction, direct resources, and design policies and programs aimed at accelerating student learning.
The report compares average scores for Michigan students to national norms that each assessment provider established before the pandemic. For example, the 50th percentile represents the average for students from across the country who took the same assessments before the pandemic. Between fall 2020 and spring 2021, average test scores for Michigan students fell from the 44th to the 41st percentile in math and from the 52nd to the 47th percentile in reading. Disruptions to student learning that year disproportionately affected the state’s lowest-performing students and, as a result, achievement gaps widened.
“While it’s good to see that students have begun to recover academically in many ways from lost time in the classroom due to the pandemic, Michigan educators recognize that students, educators and school communities need to continue working hard to improve student learning in reading, math and other subjects, especially in reading,” said State Superintendent Dr. Michael F. Rice. “Students who were educated remotely for longer than their peers and who were in the learning-to-read window —particularly if they were economically disadvantaged — especially need support. More time and interventions for these children, stronger professional development for staff, and the new literacy and dyslexia bills approved by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will all help improve student achievement in reading.”
Math achievement has increased significantly with particularly stark improvements during the 2023-24 school year. On average, Michigan students scored at about the 49th percentile in spring 2024, suggesting that that they have not only recovered to the same level as in fall 2020 but significantly surpassed that level. However, the data available for this study begins in 2020-21 so it is not clear whether these scores are above those of Michigan students before the initial school closures in 2019-20.
Reading has changed very little in Michigan since the initial declines in 2020-21, fluctuating between the 46th and 48th percentiles over the following three school years. However, low-performing readers in some grade levels progressed at more accelerated rates than their peers in 2023-24, narrowing the gap between the state’s highest- and lowest-scoring readers. Despite some improvement, reading achievement gaps remain wider than they were before the pandemic, especially at the elementary level.
According to Tara Kilbride, interim associate director of EPIC, these patterns are consistent with recent results on the M-STEP, Michigan’s statewide summative assessment. Proficiency rates improved on most M-STEP tests in 2024, but declined slightly in third and fourth grade English Language Arts.
“Elementary-level reading stands out as an area of concern in recent data from both summative and benchmark assessments,” Kilbride said. “Supporting student literacy has to remain a top priority, especially for students who were in early elementary grades during the height of the pandemic.”
The report shows that both the initial declines in student achievement and improvements in later years were concentrated in school districts that did not offer in-person instruction for part or all of the 2020-21 school year. Between fall 2020 and spring 2021, gaps in reading achievement between fully in-person and fully-remote districts nearly doubled, while math gaps between these districts more than tripled.
Starting in 2021-22, learning rates improved significantly for students who had limited access to in-person instruction the previous year. On average, achievement growth among this group of students accelerated enough to maintain the same percentile rank as in spring 2021, rather than declining further, but was not enough for them to catch up. The large disparities that emerged between districts offering different instructional modalities in 2020-21 still persist as of spring 2024.
While this study helps to deepen our understanding of how Michigan public school students progressed and learned during the last four school years, the authors stress that there are limitations to the data. The analyses in the report represent only a subset of the K-8 student population across the state, and prior research has shown that the pandemic has had a greater negative effect on achievement and growth for the specific student populations who tend to be underrepresented in the data. Additionally, state law no longer requires all school districts to participate in benchmark assessments and many chose to not continue participating. As a result, the samples of students and districts represented in the new report are somewhat smaller than those in EPIC’s previous reports.