North Carolina schools face uneven recovery in math and reading since 2019

The Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University released its annual State of the Student report highlighting national struggles in education six years after the COVID-19 pandemic, WFAE reported. The report found that only 10.5% of students nationwide are in districts that have fully recovered to 2019 math and reading levels, with gaps widening between high- and low-performing students since 2022.

According to the report, only Louisiana has returned to pre-pandemic baselines in both math and reading, while evidence suggests student performance began declining years before the pandemic. This indicates that COVID-19 alone does not explain the current challenges in education.

The report also notes that states are taking widely different approaches to education recovery, often influenced by partisan ideologies rather than evidence-based strategies. This has led to increasing disparities in average scores on nationally standardized tests among states since 2019.

In North Carolina, which recently experienced a political shift, debates over school funding, vouchers, and reading instruction methods are ongoing. The report raises concerns that education quality may increasingly depend on which political party controls state policies, potentially deepening inequalities.

The authors of the report warn that without shared evidence-based strategies and structures to evaluate effectiveness, the divergence in state education policies could worsen educational inequality across the country.