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New York Student Test Scores Show Little Improvement Post-Pandemic

Student performance in math and reading is still below pre-pandemic levels, according to new data — but on par with the national average.

Bianca Fortis   ·   January 29, 2025
Overall, national reading scores declined among fourth and eighth graders between 2022 and 2024. | Photos: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

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New York student test scores in math and reading have largely stagnated since the pandemic, according to new data released Wednesday.

The National Center for Education Statistics tracks the data among fourth and eighth graders at public schools nationwide and publishes the results every two years. New York hasn’t improved much since the last round of data was released, and its students’ scores are largely consistent with the national average, the data show.

Statewide, fourth grade math scores made moderate gains, and some subgroups — like English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students — made slight improvements. However, math and reading scores for those groups have largely been on the decline in New York over the last two decades.

“The Nation’s Report Card” previously showed sharp declines in 2022 scores following the Covid-19 pandemic. With schools returning to a sense of normalcy, the latest data offer an important look at how student performance is recovering.

“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, the NCES commissioner, during a call with the media. “We’re not seeing the progress we need to retain the ground students lost during the pandemic.”

Photo collage of Donald Trump in front of school desks, with a map of New York state in the background.

Nationwide, the gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing students is widening, and has become worse since the pandemic, Carr said.

Overall, national reading scores declined among fourth and eighth graders between 2022 and 2024. Increases in math scores during that same period are largely driven by high-performing students, Carr said.

In New York City, fourth graders saw a slight jump in math scores, though Black and Hispanic students had average scores that were more than 30 points lower than white students.

On average, fourth grade reading scores, as well as both math and reading scores for eighth graders in New York City, largely remained the same as 2022.

Carr pointed to students repeatedly missing school as one indicator of poor student performance. Rates of chronic absenteeism have improved since 2022, but have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“One of the obvious messages that we can share out of these data is that you need to send your kids to school,” Carr said. “When they’re not there, these data clearly show that they are less likely to learn.”

Carr said low reading scores are particularly troubling and are “not just a pandemic story.” The NCES first identified declines in reading scores beginning in 2017, but things got worse following the pandemic.

She pointed to Louisiana, where fourth graders had higher reading scores than before the pandemic, as a sign that hope is not lost.

“They have the boots on the ground,” Carr said. “Understand that they did focus heavily on the science of reading, but they didn’t start yesterday. They’ve been working on it several years.”

New York is among those states reforming how literacy is taught in schools. Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul and the legislature allocated $10 million to train teachers in the science of reading: teaching methods, based in scientific research, that rely heavily on phonics to teach students literacy.

“I would not say that we cannot turn this around,” Carr said. “It’s been demonstrated that we can, even in reading.”

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Bianca Fortis was the education reporter at New York Focus. She was previously an Abrams reporting fellow at ProPublica, where she spent 18 months investigating how Columbia University protected a predatory doctor who had sexually abused hundreds of patients for more than 20 years… more
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