Despite billions of dollars spent to help make up for pandemic-related learning loss, progress in reading and maths stalled over the past school year for elementary and middle-school students, according to a new national study released on Tuesday.

The hope was that, by now, students would be learning at an accelerated clip, but that did not happen over the last academic year, accordingto NWEA, a research organisation that analysed theresults of its widely usedstudent assessment tests taken this spring by about 3.5 million public school students in third through eighth grade.

In fact, students in most grades showed slower-than-average growth in maths and reading, when compared with students before the pandemic. That means learning gaps created during the pandemic are not closing — if anything, the gaps may be widening.

“We are actually seeing evidence of backsliding,” said Karyn Lewis, a lead researcher on the study.

On average, students need the equivalent of an additional 4.5 months of instruction in maths, and an extra four months in reading to catch up to the typical prepandemic student. That’s on top of regular classroom time. Older students, who generally learn at a slower rate and face more challenging material, are the furthest behind.

National exams last year showed that students in most states and across almost all demographic groups had experienced troubling setbacks, especially in maths, because of the pandemic, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a gold-standard federal exam. And last month, national maths and reading test results for 13-year-olds hit the lowest level in decades.

Students who do not catch up may be less likely to go to college and, research has shown, could earn $70,000 less over their lifetimes.

The question for educators and federal officials is how to address the four-month gap. Few academic interventions — standard tutoring, summer school, smaller class sizes — are powerful enough by themselves. And the last round of federal Covid relief funding must be spent or committed by September 2024.

Recovery plans have varied widely across thousands of school districts in the US, with little national accounting of how the money has been spent.

Many districts juggled competing priorities.

New York Times News Service