Michigan students show progress, but still face COVID-19-related hurdles

Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, or EPIC, has released a new report that shows Michigan students have made meaningful progress but have not yet fully recovered from pandemic-era disruptions to student learning.

The report finds that math achievement increased significantly during the 2023–24 and 2024–25 school years, but only a portion of this progress carried over from one school year to the next. Meanwhile, gaps between the state’s high- and low-performing readers have narrowed in middle school grades, but elementary-level reading performance remains stagnant.

EPIC researchers analyzed math and reading benchmark assessment scores for Michigan students in kindergarten through eighth grade during the 2020–21 through 2024–25 school years. Benchmark assessments monitor students’ progress toward grade-level standards and learning goals and help educators, policymakers and other stakeholders identify where additional support or intervention may be needed. EPIC’s report compares Michigan students’ performance to national norms established before the COVID-19 pandemic (the 50th percentile represents the average for students from across the country who took the same assessments before the pandemic).

The report emphasizes that these findings must be interpreted within the context of the imperfect data available to analyze student learning growth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Participation rates were lower than those typical of end-of-year summative assessments, and groups of students who were most affected by the pandemic may be underrepresented.

The report shows that, more than five years since COVID-19’s unprecedented disruptions to learning and schooling began, student achievement trends in Michigan show both signs of progress and enduring challenges. Although students are making strong learning gains in math during the school year, those gains have not fully translated into sustained, long-term growth.

During the 2023–24 school year, Michigan students advanced from the 43rd to the 50th percentile (relative to pre-pandemic national norms) between the fall and spring testing periods. When students returned the following fall, their relative achievement fell to the 47th percentile. Accelerated math growth during the 2024–25 school year enabled students to regain lost ground and reach the 51st percentile in the spring of 2025 — slightly above the pre-pandemic national median and well above the average for Michigan students in fall 2020. While these short-term gains are encouraging, the larger-than-typical setbacks between school years suggest that students are not fully retaining their progress from one year to the next.

Reading achievement trends tell a different story. Michigan students began the 2020–21 school year above national norms in reading, with average scores at the 53rd percentile. By the end of that year, reading achievement fell to the 49th percentile (just below the national median) and has remained within 1 percentile point of this ranking ever since. This stagnation in reading, and its comparison to trends in math performance, mirrors national results on the MAP Growth and i-Ready assessments.

The initial disruptions to student learning in 2020–21 widened gaps between higher- and lower-performing students in both reading and math. Although average reading scores remain relatively unchanged, the report finds evidence of improvements among Michigan’s lowest-scoring readers, especially in middle school grades. As a result, gaps between high- and low-performing readers have narrowed. While these gaps are improving, they have not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic norms. In math, gaps between high- and low-performing students remain about as large today as they were in 2021.

“It is encouraging to see Michigan students making gains in recent years on these reading and math assessments,” said Interim State Superintendent Sue C. Carnell. “Hard work by local districts and students is paying off. That said, we still have much room for further improvement in reading and math achievement, and we believe we should see more growth with the implementation of new literacy and dyslexia laws. Other data — including historic highs in graduation rates, Advanced Placement participation and performance, and Career and Technical Education participation and completion — also illustrate our progress.”

Demographic gaps in reading achievement, which also widened in 2020–21, have narrowed considerably since then. Reading gaps between students of different ethnic/racial backgrounds and economic statuses are now smaller than they were in fall 2020. Math gaps have improved modestly but remain substantially larger than in fall 2020.

Even as achievement gaps begin to narrow, the overall range of academic levels within classrooms remains wider than before the pandemic. According to Tara Kilbride, associate director of EPIC and lead author of the report, this variation — though improving in some areas — presents ongoing challenges for instruction, staffing and curriculum design.

“Schools and districts may need to strengthen tiered support systems, expand access to interventionists and specialists, and ensure that curricula and assessment tools are appropriate for addressing a broader spectrum of student needs,” Kilbride said. “Continued professional learning and resource investment will be crucial to support teachers in meeting their students where they are.”