New Jersey students will need until the 2026-7 school year to get back to 2019 achievement levels in math, according to a report released Wednesday showing data from 30 states.

Tom Kane joins show to talk about Michigan students slow recovery from pandemic.

Nationally, the research found that while students in many states, including Michigan, did advance in math and reading between 2022 and 2023, the gains hardly make up for losses sustained between 2019 and 2022.

More than three years after the pandemic shuttered schools and brought learning to a near standstill, Louisiana students have fully recovered in reading and made major strides in math.

Tennessee saw some of the largest learning recovery from pandemic conditions, according to a study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research.

Many American parents would be shocked to know where their kids were actually achieving. Nationally, 90% of parents think their children are reading and doing math at or above grade level. In fact, 26% of eighth graders are proficient or above in math and 31% are proficient or above in English.

As a new school year begins, parents are trying to figure out where their children stand after the dramatic learning losses of the coronavirus pandemic. School boards and lawmakers are deciding how to spend their remaining federal recovery funds — which must be designated by next fall — and where to concentrate their efforts.

New research paints the clearest picture yet of just how much learning students missed during the pandemic, and what it may take to help children in the hardest hit districts to make up ground.

As part of a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA — the Education Recovery Scorecard project — we have been sifting through data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, to understand where test scores declined the most, what caused these patterns and whether they are likely to endure.

Without a successful recovery effort, student learning loss will be the longest lasting (and most inequitable) legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.