The newest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long-Term Trend assessmentsoffer sharply different pictures, depending on students’ age and where they fall in the achievement distribution (see Figure 1 below).
Among nine-year-olds, there is some welcome news. Scores rose four points in both reading and math since 2022, with the gains concentrated among lower-performing students. The gap between the top and bottom of the distribution also narrowed for the right reason: Students at the bottom improved, rather than those at the top declining further.
These gains are genuinely encouraging and deserve to be treated as such. There were already signs of deterioration among lower-performing students before the pandemic, and Covid compounded those problems enormously. Four-point increases do not repair all the damage, of course, but they are substantial, statistically significant, and a welcome indication that an academic recovery is underway for some who badly need it.
Less encouraging is what happened to scores for students near the top of the distribution, which showed no statistically significant changes between 2022 and 2025. This after scores for the top students declined only slightly between 2020 and 2022 (which itself was remarkable, given the closures and other disruptions of the pandemic).
The basic story is simpler than the statistics make it sound. Scores for high-performing nine-year-olds fell much less than those for their lower-performing peers during the pandemic, but they have barely rebounded. While students further down the distribution made sizable gains, those at the top remained in roughly the same place.